I often find myself taking a pass on plays I would, in theory, love to see staged: Ordinarily, I’d have jumped at the chance of seeing “The Persians,” but I knew that the Shakespeare theatre had turned Aeschylus’s work into an anti-George Bush screed. I was still trying to recover from the Karl Rove figure who had been inserted into the Washington company’s production of “Richard III.”
The New York Sun’s Alicia Colon apparently has had the same experience:
“I was under the impression that the Shakespeare plays were a good thing. Then I realized that my tax dollars were paying not only for something I’d never enjoy, but for productions that were less about Shakespeare than about politics. Public theater, public television, public radio: They are totally ensconced in the ‘liberal’ realm that offers little fare for conservatives. Amusingly, my thesaurus still renders synonyms for the word ‘liberal’ that have become anachronistic, such as open-minded, tolerant, moderate. NPR? I don’t think so.”