The Big Picture and the Closeup

 Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review The Challenge Is Still There in The Color Purple at Toby’s Posted on BroadwayWorld.com on September 17, 2012 The 2005 musical of Alice Walker’s epochal novel The Color Purple, now revived at Toby’s Columbia, is a more-than-honorable attempt to capture the principal themes and […]

There is an overlay of mutual incomprehension in the struggle over the Innocence of Muslims video. But I would submit that both sides still have pretty clear ideas about what is at stake.

AS the play shows, even if the personal is political, personal trajectories and political ones can diverge. The sundering of Mattachine’s founders from the Society, and then from each other, is deftly rendered, along with the disagreements, persisting to this day, between those who embrace queer culture and wish to stay somewhat aloof from the straight world and assimilationists who view homosexuals as another marginalized minority that must strive for acceptance and integration. In short, this is a big play, with big themes.

It is true enough, then, that the subsequent move from serfdom to contract, towards a world where one only assumed voluntarily “the work of making productive” someone else’s land was a glory of Western civilization. But it is arguable that the feudal distinction between one’s own land – or workplace – and someone else’s was not so glorious, and it wasn’t reversed in the move from status to contract, in fact it became perpetuated. The union movement seeks to restore in modern workplaces not merely bargaining power but some of the stakeholder status pre-feudal workers had earlier enjoyed. Recognizing that unions seek to offset an ancient imbalance provides at least an argument for the indignation they seek to invoke against non-union shops.