[Marxism] What MacBird Was About - Kennedy as much as LBJ

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some where in the world, there is probably a high school or college  
production of MacBird in preparation or production.

Family, politics, murder, regime change -- it was at hand for a  
classically educated, enthusiastic radical. As she says "The plot was  
a given."

For most of 1962, she and her equally talented husband, Marvin, were  
members of the Young Socialist Alliance.* Both were active in  
building the Spring 1962 Charter Demonstration against Kennedy, key  
members of the Free Speech Movement, and initiators of stimulating  
products combining radicalism and culture.

She earns her living today not only from the modest residuals of  
MacBird and some credited books, but also as a free-lance writer and  
editor on social issues for several publications.

Brian Shannon
_________________
*They criticized the absence of formal democracy in Cuba, but they  
left over the lengthy suspension of Lenni Brenner (then Glazer) when  
the Berkeley YSA found it necessary to separate itself from Lenni's  
enthusiastic and uncontrollable opposition to laws criminalizing the  
use of Marijuana.

=============================

She Hopes 'MacBird' Flies in a New Era

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, September 5, 2006; C05

"MacBird!" playwright Barbara Garson says she never meant to imply 39  
years ago in her Shakespearean spoof of American politics that Lyndon  
Johnson engineered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  
Given that she used the murder-filled plot of "Macbeth," however,  
some people took it that way.

Garson's controversial -- in some quarters notorious -- 1967 play is  
being revived by American Century Theater in Arlington Friday through  
Oct. 7.

"People used to ask me then, 'Do you really think Johnson killed  
Kennedy?" Garson, now 65, recalls. "I never took that seriously. I  
used to say to people, if he did, it's the least of his crimes. . . .  
It was not what the play was about. The plot was a given."

When the play opened at New York's Village Gate, Garson was in her  
mid-20s, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley --  
that hotbed of anti-Vietnam War sentiment -- and a founding member of  
the Free Speech movement there. After "MacBird!" she won a 1976-77  
Obie Award for her off-Broadway children's play "The Dinosaur Door,"  
but is more prolific as the author of nonfiction books, including  
"Money Makes the World Go Round" and "The Electronic Sweatshop: How  
Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future." She is working  
on a new play, titled "Security," about the economic, not the  
national kind.

MacBird is a larger-than-life Texas politico serving uncomfortably as  
vice president under the Machiavellian, aristocratic president, John  
Ken O'Dunc. MacBird and Lady MacBird, as per Shakespeare, engineer  
Ken O'Dunc's murder. Garson says she feels her spoof was "fair to  
everybody except Lady Bird," harshly caricatured as "Lady MacBird."

"It wasn't an anti-Johnson play," Garson says, though she did intend  
it as a broad critique of both Kennedy's and Johnson's approach to  
politics. "It was the Johnson that Bill Moyers described . . . self- 
dramatizing, self-pitying, but also a true liberal, and unable to  
understand why these Kennedys, who did so little, really, were  
thought of as so beautiful."

Johnson, she says, "was as bad as the other guys in this play . . .  
but he wasn't worse."
. . .
"What 'MacBird!' was about was asking the political people not just  
to jump on the Kennedy bandwagon or the Democratic Party thing, but  
to produce something independent that was worthy of our efforts. And  
we didn't do that," says Garson of the '60s counterculture. "We  
influenced the culture immensely . . . but we didn't leave any  
structure."

The lines in "MacBird!" are borrowed, and in some cases rejiggered,  
from many of Shakespeare's plays -- whatever worked. Most famously,  
there was "Bubble and bubble, toil and trouble, Burn baby burn, and  
cauldron bubble."

"I would just look for anything. I knew what I had to say, but if I  
could find a half a line or a line in which he said it," that was  
preferable, Garson says. When watching her play during its long run  
at the Village Gate, she says, "I'd go, oh my goodness, did I write  
that? And invariably it would be a line right out of  
Shakespeare . . . I had taste. He's just good."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/04/ 
AR2006090400993.html

OR http://makeashorterlink.com/?M153226BD




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