The most recent plays we have seen were Robert Brustein's "Spring Forward/Fall Back" at Theater J, and Paula Vogel's "The Long Christmas Ride Home" at the Studio Theatre. Both were disappointing. Brustein's play was about three generations of increasingly less Jewish families, whose taste in music disintegrated as did their overall cultural level. It was trite, demeaning to the women in the play even more than the men, and painful to sit through. Vogel's play was also about three generations who went from bad to worse after a miserable Christmas celebration where the father and his father-in-law got into a fist fight, and the kids (who seemed to have a chance in life) turned out to be wasted, social outcasts. Both playwrights are well known and celebrated; both theaters put on nice productions with strong casts. But neither play was worth the time or ticket price in my opinion. (The reviews, by the way, were mixed, as apparently were overall audience reactions.)
Why continue to go to theater if this is what you see too often? Because, as the old saying goes, "better bad breath, than no breath at all".
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