review
In fact Weekend‘s politics aren’t realistic at all. The play imagines a Republican senator who decides to stake his run for the 1968 presidential nomination on his opposition to the Vietnam war, only to see his campaign threatened by his son’s plan to marry an African-American woman. Such a premise would have seemed unlikely at best at the time—which may be why Vidal channels it into an epigrammatic, lightly satiric comedy of manners in the style of Oscar Wilde. Its humor depends almost entirely on the improbability of its plotting, the archness of its tone, and the shallowness of its characters.
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The play’s other targets include hawkish American foreign policy (“It is our painful duty to bring freedom to everybody everywhere,” declares Mrs. Andrews), the voting public (“Unlike nature, the American electorate adores a vacuum”), psychiatry, homophobia, the media, and Christianity. The strongest disapproval of Beany and Louise’s marriage plans is registered by the MacGruders’ black butler, Roger (Sean Nix), a fundamentalist who believes that “miscegenation is against God’s law.” The only character who has no opinion on the matter is the MacGruders’ harried pollster, Norris Blotner (Ian Paul Custer)—whose job, after all, is to record other people’s thoughts, not to have any of his own.
