Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Mac Bird! by Barbara Garson Mac Bird! by Barbara Garson. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 658cb7532fe684f8 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Mac Bird. There may be a special circle of hell, near Limbo but verging on the abode of party-bores and the wartime baseball players, appointed for writers who Articulate the Concerns of their Time, whose books are eventually parsed to death in intellectual history seminars and who are very thoroughly forgotten by everyone who neither pays nor is paid to read them. Such are Barbara Garson and her skitlet MacBird (I eschew the exclamation point!)--a document, a gadget, a pseudo-cerebral mummers' play in moral blackface. The fact that MacBird's concerns are nearly as unmemorable as its era may prove to be won't modify the play's appeal for future historians; nor can it extend MacBird's predictable stage life beyond eighteen months. For the last year MacBird (we are told) has been circulating at anti-war rallies and publishers' luncheons, waiting for a cause to happen to it. None did, and the critics made their own. MacDonald, Brustein, Clureman and Robert Lowell declared the play a theatrical experience of sheer delight, even if its political argument was pernicious nonsense; Kerr and Lionel Abel took no delight at all in the politics, and found no other grounds for applause. MacBird's referents in real life are obvious and tangible: a jowly, gutter-mouthed Lyndon Johnson supported by assorted cronies and a megalomaniacal wife; a string of identical Kennedys whose misfortunes (the assassination, Bobby's exile and Ted's plane crash) are attributed to the Chief's ambition and insecurity; and a few foreshortened political standbys like Stevenson, Warren and Wayne Morse. The rhetoric is tired and tiring. J.F. Ken O'Dunc promises "A giant generation / geared for glory, seared in sacrifice"; his successor pledges the achievement of "the Smooth Society" which "has room for all; / for each, a house, a car, a family, / A private psychoanalyst, a dog, / And rows of gardens, neatly trimmed and hedged"; Bobby, after slaughtering the usurper and mounting the dias, announces his continuing to MacBird's ideals. MacBird is constitutionally immune to Negroes, Bobby to idealism; all show a ruthlessness and vulgarity that calls up all sorts of traditional cliches about politicians. MacBird's perspective on foreign policy is no more imaginative. The Pox Americana threatens to descend on all the world's wayward nations ("Our force shall only force them to be free"), while a mounting crisis in Vietland underscores the play's domestic spectacle. And the New Left (personified in the three witches, a New Negro, and old Wobbly and an audacious little coed) is damned along with the rest of the pack interested only in social disorder ("Bubble and bubble, toil and trouble, / Burn Baby Burn and caldron bubble"). By taking a good swipe at every available special interest group, MacBird avoids agitprop and falls somewhat heavily into the category of the Interesting. All hysterical remarks about the play's political truth aside, the best that can be said for it is that it provides a vaguely satisfying hour's reading; the worst, that it leaves the reader with a swelling sense of self-satisfaction. After all, 3rd Witch: O Wondrous scene! I found it low, pathetic and obscene. How true. MacBird's too easy to attack. By now he's scoffed and sneered at left and right. He's so despised it's fash'nable in fact. To call him villain, tweak him by the nose. Break with his party and jeer him in the press. And then there's Shakespeare, who must be regarded as an accessory to the production. Miss Garson told a Newsweek reporter, 'I was unhappy when I couldn't find a corresponding scene (in Shakespeare)--then I had to write the scene myself. I'm glad I used Shakespeare; it allowed me, an inexperienced playwright, to shape things in the play." Macbeth, Hamlet and Julius Casear provide matrices for most of MacBird's episodes, and supply the better part of the linguistic embroidery. Miss Garson also draws on Othello for bits of martial brouhaha and on Richard II for the pervasive vegetable metaphor that crops up in MacBird's first press conference ("This land will be a garden carefully pruned; / We'll lop off any branch that looks too tall / That seems to grow too lofty or too fast") and in the spectacle of a mad Lady MacBird sweetening the land with bouquets and aerosol deodorant. To assert that MacBird rapes the old Swan with no intelligence and no compassion is evidently to miss the point, for Miss Garson makes no claims for her idiom or for her pentameters. "I worked for four months with Shakespeare in front of me," she reports, "so I know the difference between a clever propagandist and a great playright." But the very intractibility of the material seems to have moved the Vintage Company and artistic director Michael Murray to a vigorous and commendable effort. Cautious pruning of the text (omitting a Beckettish spot where two cronies, stimulated by an innuendo from the Chief, march off to murder Bob and Ted, and a tedious dialogue on radical strategy from the witches) and a generous deployment of sound and properties, have tightened up an unwieldy piece of theatre. The mounting racket of loudspeakers and the only rarely excessive musical numbers create a rhythm which jars the principals past MacBird's remaining snags. John Seitzg, who stood in on Philip Hanson's MacBird last week, was purple with Texas affect and--but for an inexplicable and apparently deliberate resemblance to F.D.R.--vehemently convincing. William Lafe, Roger Davis and Kevin O'Neal provide three mail-order Ken O'Duncs who slip in and out of Kennedese; Jill Clayburgh, Roger Robinson and Louis Galterie are verveful witches. Lady McB. (Nancie Phillips) drives the Southern hostess persona to the breaking point, splitting each vowel into triads. Everyone, in short, is deft and galling; only Jake Dengel (The Egg of Head) and Gwyllum Evans (The Earl of Warren) manage to offer anything approaching straight comedy, but then the context is probably too weak to support much more of it. So What? MacBird is hardly a visitant from the infernal backside of American political thought--"a genuine happening in which an underground author confronted the overworld, exposing dangerous private fantasies to public eyes and ears" (Brustein) or "a needed corrective, a purgative of our Stygian world" (Clureman). There is nothing cathartic in its grim charade, and this is not because reality has surpassed the imitation. It is because Miss Garson's satire renders her targets immune to further burlesque by grasping--just once, and fleetingly--all the obvious uglinesses of American politics without giving a sweet damn for what they point to. If her wry defloration of ideology is pale beside Brecht's, her portrayal of convention-hall mores does not begin to approach Mencken's Murray & Co. have slightly humanized a drastically inhumane play by virtue of taste and skillful joining, but the blood-spoor lingers on the air. MacBird begins with a ritual murder and then fails both to implicate and to absolve its audience; the result is an experience of bland and almost complete detachment, and a document in the history of this tired old polis where agent and activity, critic and establishment, medium and message, are pathlogically identical. Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter. Mac Bird! by Barbara Garson. Access to raw data. MacBird!: A history and feminist critique of Barbara Garson's radical play. Abstract. Barbara Garson's controversial play, MacBird!, was written and produced during the Vietnam War era and Johnson administration. The satirical Shakespeare adaptation equates LBJ with Macbeth, the villainous tragic hero who murders his king in order to gain the Scottish crown. The implication that Johnson was responsible for the assassination of JFK created a fury of controversy among critics and the public, as well as the political leaders who were parodied. The play was first published and circulated in 1966 as an underground leaflet. In 1967, it was produced off- Broadway with a cast that featured actors Rue McClanahan, William Devane, Cleavon Little, and Stacy Keach, who won an Obie Award for his performance of the title role. The show launched the careers of these actors. Critics were divided in their reviews of the play's literary merit, but all seemed to agree that the piece was shocking and significant because it flew in the face of patriotism and of reverence for presidential authority. At the time of its production, acclaimed theater critic Robert Brustein named MacBird! "the most explosive play" of the Sixties theater movement. This dissertation presents the history of the play, within its social and political setting, from its inception through its production and abrupt disappearance at the peak of its success, which coincided with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Relying upon methodology that includes primary and secondary sources, as well as interviews with the playwright and others involved in the play, this work presents the publication and production history of MacBird!, public and White House response to the play, a contextual analysis under a feminist lens, and a final chapter on MacBird! as a precursor to feminist adaptations of canonical works, Sixties-era Macbeth adaptations, and the notable women whose work intersected in MacBird! MacBird! was a tremendous event in theater history; it belongs at the fore of adaptation studies, particularly Shakespeare and feminist adaptation studies; it is a prime model of performance as a political tool and therefore earns a central place in performance studies; and because it is an attack on patriarchal power and a rare example of a Sixties radical play written by a woman, Barbara Garson needs to be recognized among remarkable women of theater. Mac Bird! Capitalizing on the wide-spread and (still) unsubstantiated rumors that Lyndon Johnson was involved in the Kennedy assassination, Barbara Garson produced a satire of Macbeth . Many reviewers originally rhapsodized over the emergence of a new satirical playwrighting talent, comparing her to such a giant as Swift. The play got an off-Broadway production and two printings, so Garson obviously made a killing of sorts. However, we never heard from this "original" playwright again. And while Shakespeare's Macbeth still holds our attention, Garson's version has disappeared from view (Except, of course, from the Shakespeare Research Collection). MacBird! MacBird! is a 1967 satire by Barbara Garson that superimposed the transferral of power following the Kennedy assassination onto the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth . Thus John F. Kennedy becomes "Ken O'Dunc", Lyndon Johnson becomes "MacBird", Lady Bird Johnson becomes "Lady MacBird", and so forth. As Macbeth assassinates Duncan, so MacBird is responsible for the assassination of Ken O'Dunc; and as Macbeth is defeated by Macduff, so MacBird is defeated by Robert O'Dunc (i.e. Robert Kennedy). This action is significantly influenced by the Three Witches, representing Students, Blacks, and Leftists. In a 2006 Washington Post interview Garson said she was not seriously accusing Johnson of complicity in the Kennedy assassination: "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." [1] The play parodies sequences from Shakespearean tragedies including Macbeth , Hamlet , and Richard III , albeit with Texas and Boston accents. The action follows MacBird from the 1960 Democratic National Convention, when he becomes Ken O'Dunc's Vice-President ("Hail, Vice- President thou art!"), to Ken O'Dunc's assassination (at the urging of Lady MacBird), to Robert O'Dunc's victory over MacBird at the next convention. Macbird! started out as a short satirical sketch by Garson, a recent graduate of the Berkeley anti-Vietnam war movement. It was developed into a full-length play with help from writer/director Roy Levine (and Shakespeare). The production, which opened a mere three years after the Kennedy assassination, was quite controversial. It has been said that pressure from local authorities was applied to theaters in New York who were considering it. The Village Gate was the only theater willing to defy this pressure and mount the play. Macbird opened there on February 22, 1967, and closed on January 21, 1968, after 386 performances. Roy Levine, who worked with Garson to develop the work from what was essentially a sketch to a full-length play, was the original director of Macbird! His bold and unique theatrical vision marked the production throughout the run, although, near the end of the almost-complete previews, he was suddenly replaced by Gerald Freedman. Set design was by Clarke Dunham, costumes by Jeanne Button, and lights by Robert Brand. The stage manager was Joel Zwick. The opening night cast included: Stacy Keach as MacBird Rue McClanahan as Lady MacBird, [2] Paul Hecht as John O'Dunc William Devane as Robert O'Dunc John Pleshette as Ted O'Dunc John Clark as Earl of Warren Cleavon Little as Witch 2. The original cast recorded a two-disc album of the text on February 6, 1967. It was released in a boxed set with a copy of the script on the Evergreen label as Evergreen - EVR 004. John Clark left the cast early to marry Lynn Redgrave. Cleavon Little made his professional acting debut in the play. It went on to a long engagement in Los Angeles but with a different cast. There was also a production by San Francisco's Committee Theater circa 1968.