Kavanaugh’s mad, bad and dangerous to know
As a theatre critic, I am nothing if not critical. Yet I was so alarmed by Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s performance at the U.S. Senate judiciary committee that by Thursday evening, I had to punch myself in the jaw just to close my mouth. I looked like Nicolas Cage, all slack-jawed and drooling in Leaving Las Vegas or Army of One or every film he has ever made.
Title suggestions: For preteens, Boohoo Brett. For a campus theatre audience, Indelible in the Hippocampus is the Laughter. For elder care centres: I Live on the Sunrise Side of the Mountain.
1. First, what the hell was that? A job interview? A therapy role-play about an alcoholic and his cold dad? An audition for a Broadway show? If so, was it Death of a Salesman? Night of the Stink Thing? At one point, I was certain Kavanaugh was Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction but he didn’t suddenly rise out of the bath with a kitchen knife at the end, so no. I think.
2. Whatever it was, it captured the room. The studio audience was rooted to the spot, though perhaps only because they were afraid to leave in case Kavanaugh had an assault rifle.
3. Why so big, Brett? There’s big and there’s too big and he went too big all the way. Had his director not told him that every character has an arc? Which generally means a manly weep alone on an airport tarmac or a fishing boat. Kavanaugh cried so hard I could have wrung him out into my Grey Goose vodka. Sobbing non-stop is an acting crime because it distracts the audience, especially that level of sniffling. Does the man not have a tissue? He sniffed so often and so weirdly that he looked like a rabbit, which Ted Cruz already does.
4. I am being told that Kavanaugh was auditioning as a putative U.S. Supreme Court justice (I did not suspect that), a role that demands all of an actor’s power of silence. You plow narrow, you plow straight and you minimize. Kavanaugh should have used his outdoor face, leaving his indoor shouty face for floozies in Devil’s Triangles, Renate at parties, his scared wife and his agent. Onstage, we don’t need the Full Hannity. When the audience starts anticipating a pointy, spitty “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” you’ve gone too far. Shame about that.
5. Did no one do a syntax rewrite? Words Brett should not have used: “beer,” “beer, beer, beer” ad nauseam, “weak stomach,” “complicit with evil,” “your worst nightmare,” and especially “blow me up and take me down.” “Clintons.” “Catholic all-girls high schools,” “my friends Amy, or Julie, or Kristin, or Karen, or Suzanne, or Moira, or Megan, or Nikki. Matt, Denise, Laurie and Jenny.” “Eighty-four women.” “Sixty-five women.” “I may never be able to coach girls’ basketball again.” “Squee.” “Flatulence.”
6. No drinking offstage. I take it Kavanaugh chose beer, possibly in one flask or many. Because no one tears up, says he super-loves his friends and starts listing their names unless he’s had a few. Equally explains the sudden domestic-abuser-type slide into rage. Am wondering if Mark Judge exists. Perhaps it’s a stage name for the Kavanaugh who performs at carnivals and nail salon Christmas parties. Never let your characters leak into each other.
7. Americans are abnormally attached to childhood and high school rather than adult life. That’s why they wear shorts, baseball caps and athletic shoes, even indoors. Kava- naugh would not shut up about high school. It was to him what Tintern Abbey was to Wordsworth in 1798. That said, never bring a tween girls basketball team onstage to a Senate hearing. It makes you look like Larry Nassar.
8. The show failed the Bechdel Test of whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Again, call rewrite. The script basically referred to men as boys, and women as Satan’s handmaids. That’s not a character arc for Kavanaugh, that’s a flatline.
9. What part was Dr. Christine Blasey Ford auditioning for? Precise, brave, believable, well-prepared and humane, she’d make a terrific Supreme Court justice. Oh. I’m being told she in fact played the role of Token Woman. Worst casting failure since Vince Vaughn in the 1998 remake of Psycho. Ford would make a stellar Lila Crane, the sister out to solve the case, second accuser Deborah Ramirez would be Marion Crane in the shower, and Kavanaugh would be Norman Bates, though he’s more of a Marion, the eternal victim. Sen. Lindsey “The Little Jerk” Graham would play Bates’s mother although “ah doo declay-ah” he really wants the role of “dumb southerner” Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Sen. Chuck Grassley plays a shower curtain ring.
10. The plot hinged on a “Flake,” which is weird. It’s normally “a handbag.” (Sen. Orrin Hatch, there’s my Lady Bracknell.) Is this a snowflake? A space cadet? Anyway, Kavanaugh basically won the vote, which is inadvisable. Americans love happy endings. The audience has been through so much. At least give them that.