The Story
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Wilson’s play is loosely based on the 1981 Janet Cooke case–the mother of all journalism scandals. A black reporter at the Washington Post, Cooke won a Pulitzer for “Jimmy’s World,” an article about an eight-year-old heroin addict. She refused to reveal the boy’s real name or where he lived, citing the need to protect her sources. The paper’s editors initially stood by her, but once they found that she’d lied extensively on her resume they confronted her, and she admitted making the whole thing up–later blaming pressure from Post editors to produce award-winning work. Since Cooke the hall of shame for media liars has grown: Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle of the Boston Globe, Wade Roberts of the Sun-Times, Stephen Glass of the New Republic, and Jayson Blair of the New York Times.
Though in Smith’s and Blair’s cases well-meaning but misguided attempts to integrate newsrooms were blamed in part, affirmative action doesn’t explain the astounding pathology of the arrogant Glass, who’s white. As a friend observed, what Blair and Glass prove is that affirmative action is mostly a problem when it’s affirmative action on behalf of chronic ass kissers, particularly when they’re eager to succeed without paying their dues.
Wilson isn’t concerned with making her characters likable: their ambiguity is one strength of her writing. Only the besieged widow, played with great emotional resonance by Kati Brazda, comes across as appealing. In Spinning Into Butter Rebecca Gilman, the Goodman’s poster girl of social-issue dramas, sets up the viewer by creating a nice, white liberal professor who eventually delivers a ponderous monologue that reveals her inner racist. Wilson’s characters are too busy working the game for reflection. That apparent lack of self-awareness is risky–occasionally one feels Wilson is painting by numbers rather than fully investigating her characters. But the fact is most people don’t think out loud about the split between who they are and who they pretend to be. It’s not race or gender or class that’s responsible for Yvonne’s undoing; it’s her need to create a version of herself that transcends these categories, no matter how distant that version is from the truth.
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