RICHARD WAGNER: PAGE 3 GIRL

posted by James Reel

    Here’s a sensationalist item you’d expect to find in one of the British tabloids, but not in the respectable Guardian: Richard Wagner was a cross-dresser, maybe. This allegation is based on a previously unpublished letter in which Wagner orders a dress, listing its every frill and bow in great detail. Nowhere does he state that the dress is for his use, rather than for his wife, Cosima, and there’s no indication that he ordered it in his size, rather than hers. Wagner was a notorious micromanager, so I see no reason for him not to be intimately familiar with the specifics of female couture, along with so many other things. Maybe he was a cross-dresser, but this letter proves absolutely nothing. Let’s have some actual evidence. Didn’t journalists learn anything from the WMD fiasco?
    And, by the way, if Wagner did enjoy slipping into a skirt now and then, so what? Defenders of his character have bigger things to contend with than supposed transvestism. This is an issue I just can’t care about, and I bring it up only as an example of press laziness. Shall we now have a little chat about cold fusion?
    Maybe this lung infection is just making me intolerant. More than usual, I mean.

POKE AT A 'PIG'

posted by James Reel

    In the current Tucson Weekly, I review a late-night production of Neil LaBute’s rather slim Fat Pig:

    Back in his student days, Neil LaBute must have heard the term "theater of cruelty" and decided to make it his own: not the violent shattering of false reality that Antonin Artaud had in mind, but something more literal, more petty and personal. LaBute has devoted his career to showing us what nasty little assholes we are.
    LaBute is best known for his quietly vicious first two films, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, but he's also quite an active playwright. By LaBute's standards, Fat Pig--the current late show at Live Theatre Workshop--is a tender romance, but LaBute isn't really cut out for a play revolving around two nice people. Malignant forces do go to work on our hero and heroine, but the whole thing seems just a bit soft. LaBute doesn't bite into his hero's soul; he just gives it a good, hard gumming.