Full Press Page for Something You Did
Washington Post Backstage
By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
To fully commit to the Theater J drama "Something You Did," the playwright, the director and the actors in two main roles had to make peace with characters whose moral lapses are in the extreme.
The playwright, Willy Holtzman, patterned the central character -- imprisoned '60s antiwar radical Alison Moulton -- on real-life Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin.
Boudin, who was paroled in 2003, served 23 years in prison for her role in a 1981 armored-car robbery in which two police officers and a security guard were killed. Holtzman wanted to write a play about someone like Boudin but thought he had to change the nature of the crime.
"To have her background and her advantages and her intellect . . . and then go astray the way she did, it's hard to understand, isn't it?" Holtzman says rather rhetorically.
"I couldn't begin to write about the Brinks armored-car robbery," he continues. "For me, that only can be seen one way. So I put that aside and invented the event of the play."
He began writing "Something You Did" (at Theater J through Oct. 3) not long after Boudin's parole. In the play, Alison is involved with a radical group that detonates a bomb intended to destroy property, but a policeman dies -- and Alison purchased the nails that made the bomb more destructive. " 'Do you have any nails?' she says to the guy behind the counter, and there it is -- her whole life changed on a dime," says Deborah Hazlett, who plays Alison.
When we meet Alison, she has served 35 years and is up for parole.
Of her character, Hazlett says, "It's really, really hard to understand the move from passion and commitment and concern about the horrible things that were going on around civil rights and the Vietnam War and the leap to violence."
Yet Hazlett has empathy for Alison, who does all sorts of good works in prison: "I do think that Alison has a lot of courage and a lot of commitment and certainly has spent a lot of her 35 years in prison really trying to atone for her choices. . . . I love her humanity."
Actor Rick Foucheux had a tougher time in rehearsals coming to terms with his character, Gene, a onetime fellow traveler and lover of Alison's who was involved in the bombing but managed to distance himself from the act -- and from Alison -- and avoided prison. After the crime, Gene has become a conservative pundit. (Holtzman says Gene is patterned mostly on conservative author, broadcast personality and onetime radical David Horowitz.)
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Of his character, Foucheux says: "It was hard for me just to let go of the things that this guy did to make him a heel -- that he pulled out right after the bombing and let her take the fall and never contacted her again for 35 years."
The actor continues: "I just thought him reprehensible in a lot of ways and I had to be talked out of that by the director." It helped, he notes, to acknowledge the guy's intellectual chops as a thoughtful conservative. "I can give him credence there. But I can hardly pass on what he did to his girlfriend."
Director Eleanor Holdridge says she, too, fought to maintain an evenhanded approach to the work.
"When I first read the play," she says, "my own personal politics leans frankly more toward Alison than Gene. . . . It's so tricky to try and keep that away and look with [fairness] on what makes the guy tick."
Holdridge says she concluded that guilt over the bombing influenced Gene as much as it did Alison, only differently. "The guilt from what they did has led them into two vastly different ways of atoning for it. . . . I do think [Gene's] change in politics is about his guilt.
" . . . I think he actually has taken his guilt and is trying to heal what he did through his actions, even though one could argue it's hypocrisy."
Washington Post
Theater review: 'Something You Did' at Theater J
By Nelson Pressley
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Political discourse is one of the subjects of Willy Holtzman's densely topical "Something You Did" at Theater J, so there's no point complaining that it's melodramatic. What else could it be? In the real world, debates turn partisan; moral issues inevitably get cast as good vs. bad. We wrestle over history and shout to control the narrative. We don't do gray very well. And the talk isn't very graceful.
"He's the devil," declares Alison Moulton, the jailed antiwar activist in Holtzman's drama (which premiered two years ago and is getting an earnest, if not fiery, staging at Theater J). Alison is describing an old lefty colleague and lover who has morphed into a hyped conservative rant-master. In the play this figure goes by the name of Gene Biddle, but David Horowitz and Glenn Beck are his real-life analogues; Gene not only churns out books but also spouts political sanctimony on TV. Alison is based on Kathy Boudin, the Weather Underground radical who spent more than two decades in jail for her part in an armored-car robbery that killed two police officers and a security guard.
Obviously, this fictionalized history is terrific material for the stage -- an urgent topic with combustible characters, complex motivations to untangle and ethics to explore. ("Something You Did" is taking the place, by the way, of the previously announced "Imagining Madoff," which was withdrawn by its playwright when Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel objected to being rendered in that piece.) Alison, like Boudin, is the daughter of a famous liberal lawyer; in the play, Alison's late father's law partner, Arthur, counsels a meeting to see if Biddle will step off his high horse and help her get parole after decades in prison. As the diplomacy and strong-arm tactics unfold, Holtzman even revisits the 2008 campaign issue of Barack Obama's ties to political radical Bill Ayers.
While Holtzman keeps his drama to a tight 90 minutes, the going gets sluggish as the characters drag mountains of sordid cultural and personal baggage into full view; it's a whole lot of back story to heave into conversations. That may be part of what's keeping Eleanor Holdridge's cast from fully sinking their teeth into one another's necks. The performance is oddly cautious for nearly an hour, even though the play is crafted as a series of crossfire faceoffs.
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You're led to hope, for instance, that sparks will fly as Arthur goes behind Alison's back to win Biddle's support. But despite Norman Aronovic's grandfatherly take on Arthur's caginess and Rick Foucheux's sinister power as Biddle, the actors can't find the cadence of discord. Of all things, the scene lacks conviction.
The passion is also writ small when Alison meets Lenora, the daughter of a slain policeman. Aakhu Freeman brings haughty dignity to the role, but the character's righteous anguish doesn't feel lived in. Too little does, in this play about matters that often careen past ideology to nest, seething, in the heart.
Lolita-Marie is given some funny lines as the corrections official who befriends Alison and chafes at Biddle (one of the many ways we can tell heroes from villains here), and the actress adroitly delivers Holtzman's comic relief and softer tones. But as Holtzman's play boils down to a showdown between a tarnished angel and a rat, it's Hazlett who gives the evening dimension and heft. You can see the wear of years in her subtly fatigued bearing, hear the weight of guilt in her nearly flat voice. Foucheux, who can be a slugger of an actor, only sometimes gets all the way inside the mind of a political opportunist with a gift for making fearful, tearful catchphrases sting. Hazlett, though, becomes the real deal. She delivers exactly what this melodrama requires: a heroic performance.
Something You Did
by Willy Holtzman. Directed by Eleanor Holdridge. Scenic designer, Luciana Stecconi; lights, Jason Arnold; costumes, Frank Labovitz; sound design, Veronika Vorel. About 90 minutes. Through Oct. 3 at the DCJCC's Goldman Theater, 1529 16th St. NW. Call 800-494-TIXS or visit http://www.theaterj.org.
We Love DC
We Love Arts: Something You Did
By Don, 9:00 am September 3rd, 2010
Theater J’s Something You Did is a perfectly serviceable little production of a little play that revolves around very little personal growth and revelations that aren’t very revelatory.
Update, 3:08p: If you’ve seen the play – or don’t intend to – and want the spoiler-ific version of this review, absent the deliberate efforts at avoiding revealing plot, you can check out my comment.
When City Paper wrote about Theater J subbing in this production for the original contender they quoted Artistic Director Ari Roth. He spoke about filling “a very particular slot – that of our High Holiday season-opener, hop-scotching the Days of Awe, a period of personal and collective reflection.”
Which makes it so odd that the one thing this play absolutely lacks is any hint of reflection from any of the characters.
There’s conflict aplenty, mind you, right from the get-go when Alison butts heads with a prison guard simultaneously with helping her write a letter. The letter is supposed to go to a traffic judge, begging forgiveness for a minor offense. It’s a nice little scene that you eventually find yourself wishing had been allowed to pay off.
“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it,” Anton Chekhov said. In Something You Did the rifle is Alison’s complete mastery of the words of contrition combined with a lack of any personal feeling for what they really mean, or at least any ability to feel that regret in any context other than her own.
It wouldn’t be so frustrating if Holtzman didn’t write several moments where Alison’s lack of true contrition and real goal – parole – wasn’t so directly telegraphed. On several occasions, when pressed, Deborah Hazlett’s Alison stumbles into admitting that her overriding aim is to get out of prison, period. We’re clearly meant to see that this class warrior has a lot more lip service and slogans than true empathy. So why don’t we ever see a moment where this hinders her, or any realization of the people beyond herself?
Instead we get a lot of people shouting past each other, action that doesn’t serve the talents of any of the cast. The two folks who do best in the production are Aakhu Freeman as Lenora, the child of the officer whose death was caused by Alison’s actions, and Lolita-Marie as Uneeq the prison guard. It’s no coincidence that these are the two people least called upon to speechify and therefor most able to connect with the other actors. It’s less noticeable for the male leads who get to be quippy, particularly Aronovic’s Arthur, since clearly both men are holding the world at arm’s length with their put-on personalities. Alison’s character, the core of the play, suffers most from the talking at when she should be talking with someone.
Truly perplexing is what turns out to be the ultimate conflict; a question of who will make what deal and whether someone will keep a confidence that isn’t earned. Who cares? We never see the results of one action and we have no real idea whether the other would have had any impact, making the matters moot.
There’s nothing wrong with Something You Did. At 90 minutes without an intermission it blows by quickly and delivers a number of moments of pathos and humor. Getting to spend time with the sneaky and curmudgeonly Arthur is almost reason enough to go by itself. It’s the frustrations of unrealized potential that takes away from the experience. By not committing to either being about the process or about the morals it ends up serving neither, and that’s a shame.
COMMENT:
I realize this review was a little vague at times and that was because I felt like it was unfair to reveal very much to readers who might plan on seeing the play. So let me try to address this with the prefix: BELOW THERE BE SPOILERS.
I see why you might ask whether I had an alternate arc in mind, but I’d answer that what I really wanted was for the play to either commit to one arc or the other or really flesh them out properly.
The first two minutes of the opening scene establish Alison’s mastery of how to make an effective apology. She points right to the one word in Uneeq’s letter that undermines her sincerity and she does it with a very masterful delivery that makes you think man, this must have been a talented orator for the cause.
However it does leave you with the question – if you’re so good at this, how come you’re still in prison?
So when Arthur comes along and they discuss her impending parole hearing and he says it’s going to go the same way unless you hand them something they want you think – aha, there is it. That’s why this otherwise contrite person with excellent delivery is still in prison while people with non-political offenses are let out.
But then we get Alison driven to inarticulateness, and even after her indignant rant to Arthur about the trials of Uneeq’s life and class, we discover no, she’s more talk than substance. She just wants OUT. We are brought to question how devoted she really is to the cause. Is it just a mask she wears? Can she just take it off, as Gene did?
To really gnaw on this possibility we need a conundrum for Alison in choosing one or the other. Drop this facade of devotion to your principals or embrace them and suffer the consequences.
But we don’t get that. Alison’s decision, when the time comes, is whether or not to reveal Gene’s name. Whether to maintain loyalty to a confederate who has shown no loyalty to her.
That might be enough by itself, but we don’t get a good reason to believe that there would be any fallout even if she chose to do so. The board she’s speaking to is revealed to be well in the bag for Gene – political allies of his. For this decision to have any real oomph there needs to be believable stakes.
We get some discussion that maybe Gene’s financial situation isn’t as rock solid as it could be but it stops short of giving us a reason to believe that Alison’s possible revelation would torpedo that.
Another item we see set up is the question of outside interference with the judicial process. Uneeq petitions the judge for forgiveness but it turns out that what really happened was that Arthur got the fix in. Her apology and contrition was irrelevant. Obviously this is ripe to be a parallel in Alison’s story… but it isn’t.
Instead any soliciting on Alison’s part is right up front – Gene’s testimony. Alison doesn’t get it because she’s unwilling to provide testimony about a name of someone who worked on her case. That doesn’t work as a parallel for Uneeq because Uneeq made no sacrifices to get the intercession in her case – it happened because of the actions of other people. If it tarnishes her reputation it does so without her involvement.
That could potentially have been paralleled in the story if Arthur – realizing that Alison will never give Gene what he wants – were to hand over the intern records from the firm and accomplish the guilt-by-attorney-association that Gene desires. It would be an end-run around the attorney-client privilege he can’t violate to tie Gene to Alison and would make Alison dirty despite her efforts.
It would also more closely match the way things actually shook out in the Justice department/Gitmo lawyer case that Holtzman seems to be invoking in this storyline – in the end those names did come out.
But this is never realized.
As I said, it’s a fine little play. What keeps it from exceeding fine is this failure to have better developed themes or show some character growth. Everything above would also have been fine if we’d seen some character development but we don’t get that either.
There’s no sense that Alison ever budges an inch, nor Gene or Arthur. The insight into their characters is pretty slim, if it exists at all. I might have cut it some more slack as a Rorschach test for the audience if thinks like Alison’s questionable empathy weren’t so obviously laid out for us.
The only question we’re left to actually ponder is whether Alison gets her parole. What analysis does that leave us as an audience? It borders on cheap – what’s the point of leaving us with that question? Since the curtain comes down before we OR Alison knows how it turned out we don’t have any opportunity to wonder with her “was this worth it?” or “did I make the right choice?”
In the end there’s nothing more to chew on beyond “do you think she got out?” If the play doesn’t provide us with any reason to believe one thing or the other then that’s not an opportunity for discussion, it’s simply an unanswered question.
So, it’s fine. A way to pass 90 minutes. A grade of “C” is a passing mark, it’s just not anything to get excited about.
TBD
Something Willy Holtzman Did: A new look at old politics at Theater J
September 2, 2010 - 05:30 AM
By Maura Judkis (Twitter @maurajudkis)
Seventeen days after Willy Holtzman’s play Something You Did opened in New York in 2008, George Stephanopolous asked a question in the Democratic primary debate that would change the play forever. In regards to then-candidate Barack Obama’s association with former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers, Stephanopolous asked, “Can you explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won't be a problem?”
But before it changed Holtzman’s play, it changed the election, which thrust Obama’s connections to Ayers in the forefront, and culminated in a speech by Sarah Palin, where she accused him of “Pallin’ around with terrorists.” Throughout this, Holzman sat back and watched.
“I should be cynical enough, but it shocked me how much traction it got and how alive these issues are,” says Holtzman. “Also the rhetoric, the way it was talked about and propaganized in this looking-glass world, where things like bombing and terror have new meaning. Some of the figures that might have been romanticized in the 60’s to the general public might look like common terrorists now. So I had to go back in and explore that.”
In Something You Did, Alison Moulton (Deborah Hazlett) is up for parole after more than three decades in prison for her involvement with an underground political group’s activist bombing that killed an African-American cop in the 60s. The other members of the group went free - one of them, Eugene Biddle (Rick Foucheux), grew up to do a political 180 and become a Glenn Beck-inspired pundit. As Alison fights for her parole with the help of her high-powered lawyer, Arthur (Norman Aronovic), Gene makes it clear that his support for her parole will come at a price: Revealing the names of politicians who have worked on her case, so he can run their names through the mud in his next book. Gene is angling for one name in particular – of a certain someone in the White House.
The story is based on that of Kathy Boudin, a Weather Underground member who came from a wealthy leftist family (her father, Leonard Boudin, was a lawyer who represented Fidel Castro). Boudin and other Weather Underground members planted explosive devices in public spaces in protest to “Bring the War Home,” as their posters proclaimed. But when an armed robbery of a Brinks truck went terribly wrong, resulting in the death of two police officers and a security guard, Boudin was captured and sentenced to 20 years to life. She served 23 years before achieving parole.
For Holtzman, exploring Obama’s relationship to Ayers and the public’s reaction to it meant mining his own personal network. And if you want to talk about pallin’ around with terrorists, talk to Holtzman, who considers playwright Zayd Dohrn, son of Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, among his friends. Holtzman says that he ran the play by Zayd Dohrn (who approved of it) as well as consulting with Bernadine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin. In New York, Holtzman says that Zayd Dohrn and Boudin came to the preview together.
“It was a very anxious time for me,” says Holtzman. “My commitment is to my vision and version of the play. I felt entitled to my dramatic license, but you want to be truthful within the realm of fiction and I didn’t want to get anything wrong.”
Boudin offered a few small corrections about matters of her parole, Holtzman says, but was mostly pleased with her depiction. Bernadine Dohrn, on the other hand, “was very complimentary... She was very supportive, and got a big laugh at a sly reference to her in the play, and part of her persona, the leather miniskirt.” In Alison’s confrontation with Gene, he refers to her leather miniskirt and jacket, and she replies, “That was someone else,” meaning Dohrn.
Though the political climate provided plenty of material for Holzman’s update of the play, he finds himself understandably dissatisfied with the political discourse, even though the Ayers-Obama connection did not affect the election’s outcome. Preview night of Something You Did at Theater J was the same day as the big Glenn Beck rally on the Mall.
“There seem to be these professional pessimists out there that do their best to tell us that Obama is not a savior, that he’s caught in typical politics, and I share some of that frustration,” says Holtzman. “But I realize that these things are incremental. We have a president in the White House with an exotic-sounding name. It bothers me that people find new coded ways to be racist, but there are signs of progress.”
That’s similar to a line that Alison says to Gene in the play, except she uses the n-word. Holtzman talks like his characters because there’s a lot of himself in each of them – it’s a play about his generation, after all.
“I think I still share Alison’s idealism and frustration in the fundamental ways things haven’t changed,” says Holtzman. “I share Gene’s outrage at 9/11 and how that seems to redefine global politics. I’m not old enough to be Arthur, thank God, but [I have] his overview of it all, his ability to take the long view, to put things in perspective. In Washington politics, everything old is new again.”
But in playwriting, everything old may just be jettisoned for new material. Politics weren’t the only reason for Holtzman to revisit the play - he also had some work to do on the ending, the dialogue, the characters.
“The New York production imitated life in ways that weren’t dramatic in the right way,” says Holtzman. “I changed that and some internal things, and got rid of some excess.”
That addressed many of the main concerns of critics of the New York production. Charles Isherwood of the New York Times wrote that Holtzman’s words have “the squeaky sound of dialogue that has been polished a little too hard. Alison accuses Gene of speaking in sound bites, but in truth much of the writing, while fluid and eloquent, lacks the ragged authenticity of real conversations. (And somebody should have told Mr. Holtzman to lose the soapy, just-for-old-times smooch between these two; in context it is absurd.)”
This advice was taken, and the kiss is gone (a moment of hand-holding between the two, though, still feels a little icky). But there’s still plenty of snappy, polished dialogue. Some of it hits just the right notes, like when Arthur says of Gene, “I sat in traffic for two hours with this man. It’s like being locked in hell with Dick Cheney.” Some of it falls flat, or rings artificial. A friend remarked, after seeing the play last night, that it sounded like an Aaron Sorkin film. And should a legal drama ever include the line, “So sue me?”
But it’s a new version, in a new administration, in a new city, with a whole new set of critics. They’ll make their opinions known over the next few days. But Holtzman doesn’t worry about alienating people, “As long as I’m telling the truth, the dramatic truth. Especially in a play like this, you want to upset people,” he says. “You’re not doing your job if you’re not.”
Washington Life
Performing Arts: Something You Did at Theater J
Posted on 08 September 2010
Theater J presents Something You Did, a gripping emotional drama examining the consequences of youthful ideals.
By Julie LaPorte
Entering her 30th year in prison for the part she played in the death of a police officer in an anti-war bombing, Alison Moulton is seeking more than just an early release from jail. She is seeking mercy, understanding and a way to make amends. Written by Willy Holtzman and directed by Eleanor Holdridge, Something You Did is playing at Theater J through October 3.
There is no question that Alison Moulton (Deborah Hazlett) bought the nails that filled the bomb that exploded in a train station, but the resulting death of Officer Renshaw was not her intent. Eager to help her win parole after 30 years behind bars are her lawyer Arthur Rossiter (Norman Aronovic) and her prison guard Uneeq Edmunds (Lolita-Marie). Standing in opposition are the policeman’s daughter Lenora Renshaw (Aakuh Freeman) and Alison’s former-lover-and-activist-turned-neoconservative Eugene Biddle (Rick Foucheux).
Hazlett’s Alison is reserved, contained, as though her prison bars are now inside her soul. But she is still arguing passionately for the ideals of her youth, for “the good old days when we knew better days would come,” as Gene tells her quietly. Foucheux was brilliant as Gene – dynamic, forceful, unapologetic of who and what he has become. Aronovic portrays Arthur as a scrappy Brooklyn street fighter, used to fighting for lost causes. But his gruff exterior can do nothing to hide the care and worry he has for Alison.
Lolita-Marie’s Uneeq may not have had any breaks in life, but she is not bitter. She feels deeply and acts in accordance with her heart. Freeman was truly heartbreaking in her portrayal of Lenora. She is a strong, successful woman, but inside she will always be a young girl who has lost her father.
The majority of the encounters between these people take place in the prison library, lined with low bookshelves, a large metal table with four chairs center stage. Bars extend in every direction. Each interaction raises the stakes of Alison’s parole, the tension building as she meets with Lenora – the two sharing emotional reminisces of the last moments they spent with their fathers – and with Gene – the sparks flying between them as they wage an ideological war.
Rick Foucheux has been named Theater J’s Associate Artist-in-Residence for the 2010-2011 season. He will also appear in Theater J’s The Odd Couple and The Chosen.
“It’s an unusual thing for me,” he said. “I usually work at three or four theatres during the year. This is the first time I’ve done an entire year at one theatre. I’m happy about it because I like all three projects very much and I like the staff and the feeling at Theater J.”
One of his recent productions was R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE at Arena Stage. He contrasted that one-man show to Theater J’s Something You Did.
Norman Aronovic and Deborah Hazlett. Photo by Stan Barouh.
Norman Aronovic and Deborah Hazlett. Photo by Stan Barouh.
“This is a good, solid – what I would call a straight-ahead – drama,” he said. “No bells and whistles. HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE was full of multi-media and technical acrobatics. And the fact that it was a one-man show, the material was fairly acrobatic for me. This is just some really fine, meaty, dramatic acting. I have great scene partners with Norman Aronovic and Deborah Hazlett. And it’s refreshing to get onstage and interact with another person in a deep and emotional way. It goes back to the purity of why I got into acting in the first place. To try to reach others, not only in reaching the audience, but we have a real chance to touch each other on stage.”
Theater J has several ways for the audience to interact with this production – with discussions, panels and talk balks scheduled to explore the themes in Something You Did.
“The theater always makes us think in a way that movies and television can’t because they are so visual,” he continued. “I think theatre is a literary exercise as much as an entertainment exercise, and we leave the theatre, if not smarter for it, at least asking different questions than when we walked in.”
Jewish Daily Forward - Arty Semite
Seventies Radical Replaces Madoff in Theater J Season Opener
By Menachem Wecker
Stan Barouh
Deborah Hazlett as Alison Moulten in ‘Something You Did.’
“Rehabilitated? It’s just a bullshit word,” Ellis Boyd ‘Red’ Redding (Morgan Freeman) notoriously tells the parole board in “The Shawshank Redemption.” “So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit.”
Three decades into her incarceration as an accessory to the murder of a police officer, Alison Moulten, the heroine (or anti-heroine) of Willy Holtzman’s “Something You Did,” which opened this week at Theater J in Washington, D.C., is as cynical as Red is about the prospect of freedom. But whereas Red mocks the parole board, Moulten decides to contact the victim’s daughter (Aakhu Freeman) and tries to enlist her help, as well as that of a former colleague-lover turned political nemesis.
Holtzman and director Eleanor Holdridge present the most sympathetic portrait imaginable of Moulten (Deborah Hazlett), a stand-in for the Weather Underground Jewish radical Kathy Boudin, who was part of a 1984 armed robbery that left three dead. Moulten counsels fellow inmates with AIDS, runs a literacy program, and helps a guard (Lolita-Marie) dodge a $200 traffic violation ticket. Though it remains mysterious how naming names would improve her situation, Moulten also refuses to identify her co-conspirators, who planted the bomb that killed the officer.
As viewers identify with Moulten, they are also encouraged to champion her left-wing lawyer Arthur Rossiter (Norman Aronovic), who was partners with Moulten’s late father. The antagonist is Eugene Biddle (Rick Foucheux), a right-wing journalist and pundit, whom Holtzman identifies with conservative writer David Horowitz.
According to Holtzman, Horowitz “was quick to label Boudin a terrorist and equate her with ‘Islamofascists,’” but he had “his own moral baggage.” Holtzman also identifies Eugene with the “post-9/11 New Right, lately known as the Tea Party.”
If the press night’s audience of donors and VIPs — who roundly applauded an association of former Vice President Dick Cheney with Hell — is any indication of the politics of Theater J’s audience, Holtzman’s themes will be well received. But the vocabulary of the play — which is more about neoconservatives than the Tea Party — is dated.
One thing about “Something You Did” is very contemporary. The Theater J season opener was supposed to be Deborah Margolin’s “Imagining Madoff,” but the production was canceled after Elie Wiesel, who is depicted, threatened legal action.
In an article in the Washington City Paper, Ari Roth, artistic director at Theater J, says that “Something You Did” differs from “Imagining Madoff” because Holtzman changes the characters’ names. But since Holtzman identifies names in the program, one wonders if Horowitz was given the same right of refusal. Or maybe, in the eyes of Theater J, neocons just fall on the Madoff side of the equation.