“Sharply etched direction . . . and a bristling good cast of four capable of morphing on a dime.”
That skepticism would be Weiss’s own, which she’s entitled to. Sometimes reality seals our hearts against entertainment. I remember being completely unable to enjoy the movie Speed because the police and media caravan following the hijacked bus looked, to me, so identical to the slow-motion nightmare I’d watched on TV a few days before, an identical caravan tracking O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco through the same LA streets.
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And the Sun-Times dropped the lines about the Boston Marathon and alternatives to profiling. An online note after the review says, “A previous version of this review contained language about racial profiling that may have been perceived as expressing a political opinion. This is an updated version of that review.”
My big regret is that Weiss didn’t address that “necessity” more honestly—and directly. She had two choices, I think. She could have written her review as an explicit argument with the play, instead of torturing language to make her own issues sound like mere anxieties in the wind. (Not that they aren’t.) Or she could have handed off the assignment to someone else. Of course, somebody else might not have given Silk Road Rising such wonderful quotes. Justin Hayford, for example, reviewed the play for the Reader. He wasn’t a bit impressed.