Cover art by Brian Rushton
STONEWALL JACKSON'S HOUSE
Jonathan Reynolds
"The gloves come off early
in STONEWALL JACKSON'S HOUSE, Jonathan Reynolds' caustic comic
tirade against political orthodoxy. A woebegone black guide
leading a group through the haphazardly restored home of the
Confederate general suddenly stops the tour to ask a well-to-do
white couple from Ohio if she can come home with them, as their
slave.
It's a provocative moment: where
is this playwright, who so deliciously savaged film making
fifteen years ago in GENIUSES, headed with this tasteless
conceit? Mercifully, not to a scene depicting modern slavery. The
revolving panels of the play's simple set are eventually pushed
aside to reveal the rehearsal room of a small theater company
whose self-righteous administrators, interviewing playwrights for
the new season, denounce the play the audience has just sampled.
With that, Mr Reynolds climbs on
his soapbox for a ambling, funny, cranky and highly entertaining
diatribe against all the agenda-laden forces and high-minded
programs (especially of the liberal stripe) that he believes have
conspired to wring common sense out of American political and
cultural life.
Affirmative action, political
correctness, nontraditional casting, the welfare state, black
studies, ethnocentrism, multiculturalism: Mr Reynolds pushes so
many buttons he could have staged the play in an elevator....
You don't have to agree with Mr
Reynolds' inexhaustible supply of opinions to get a kick out of
this....
The plot of STONEWALL JACKSON'S
HOUSE takes several outrageous turns, culminating in a
hilariously radical restaging of the tour-guide scene along lines
more politically palatable to the theater company's old guard....
But maybe a little more
unvarnished spleen-venting is just what the theater needs."
Peter Marks, The New York
Times
"In STONEWALL JACKSON'S
HOUSE, Jonathan Reynolds has created an American play of ideas
much in the manner of Paddy Chayefsky, with intelligent
characters expressing their philosophies with a wit that sparkles
and stabs at the same time."
Howard Waxman, Variety
"...the funniest and most
outrageous play of the season, a withering fusillade of satire
aimed at our comfortably congealed political orthodoxies.
He's brought brainy
cantankerousness back with a vengeance."
Jack Kroll, Newsweek