How Do You Spell Dorktastic?
Begin in 2002, when playwright Tony Kushner spoke here, and Weiss slammed him in print for his “stock anti-Israeli diatribe.” Forward to May of last year, when Weiss said in an item about Kushner’s Caroline, or Change, “Unfortunately, Kushner, in the classic style of a self-loathing Jew, has little but revulsion for his own roots.” Given equal space in the Sun-Times to reply, Kushner called Weiss’s description of him “ugly and baseless.”
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As the producer of Wicked, Stone was on the receiving end of Weiss’s “professional tone.” John Barron, editor in chief of the Sun-Times, allowed on Chicago Tonight last week that Weiss questioned Stone “rather aggressively. . . . It got loud. It got contentious.” Apparently Stone was traumatized. “Ms. Weiss,” he said in a statement he gave the press explaining why he wouldn’t let her into the Drury Lane press conference, “behaved erratically and unprofessionally.”
Like Kushner before him, Mantello responded at length in a letter to the Sun-Times, and in language as over-the-top as Weiss’s. “These provocative interpretations are ludicrous and exist solely in the fever dream of Weiss’ paranoid imagination,” he declared. “Her excessive, stop-at-nothing refusal to critique the production on its own terms is irresponsible and insults the millions of people who suffered unspeakable in-dignities and horrors at the hands of the Nazis.”
Stone was going to have a bit of fun. Putnam County is an audience-participation show, and he intended to give everyone a taste of it.
“R-A-C-O-N-T-E-U-R,” said Lazare.
And on to round two.
