O. J. and the Nature of Tragedy

In 1994, the family had rented a vacation home in Kissimmee St. Cloud, Florida so we could easily access Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, and SeaWorld (back when that park didn’t seem like such a terrible destination). It was my second or third trip to Disney. Whatever one thinks of the company as it is now, the park has retained its charm. To a child, it really is the most magical place on Earth except for, I guess, the limits of a child’s imagination. We were taking a break from the parks, swimming in the pool, and listening to the radio when the news came out that Orenthal James Simpson—"The Juice”—was a fugitive of justice, on the run from an inevitable arrest. Off to the television we went to watch the slow speed “chase” that captured the world’s attention and the magic of theme parks turned to thoughts of murder.

I was very young and suppose I only knew O. J. from The Naked Gun movies, the first of which I thought was top-notch and didn’t need the so-so sequels that followed. But suddenly the initials O. J. were on the lips of every American for good or ill—young or old, black or white, man or woman. The chase preceded my first year at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and the trial was in full swing by the time I was a seventh grader. One lunch period that year, I was discussing the case with an older African American student (the place was so small, there was little that divided us, so a seventh grader talking to a freshman was not uncommon).

She asked if I thought O. J. was guilty. I had spent the entire summer watching gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial (I suppose a weird thing for a young boy to do, but I wasn’t exactly normal). To me, my answer seemed so self-evident. We were all so saturated with the media’s reportage, I repeated words I had heard on television: “I think he (long pause) brutally murdered both Ron and Nicole.” My “brutally” was as harsh as any of the prosecutors (and if you’ve ever seen the crime scene photos, the word is perhaps not enough to do the crime justice). But the student I gave this answer to was cautious in conversing with me from that time forward. Even in my small world (albeit in Birmingham, a town with a notorious past when it comes to race relations), the gap between races was widening. We were in a small war over a former football player turned broadcaster turned actor and the two people he killed.

It seems perverse to talk about a murder trial as being “must-see-TV” but, the entire summer before I started drama school, it was all one could think about. It did seem, as Larry King pointed out, like a show more so than a legal proceeding. All the lawyers and most of the witnesses became household names, the way you’d know any celebrity. (Even today, Marcia Clark, now a crime novelist and sometime journalist, is one of my favorite public figures—she has a bullshit detector like no one else). Young women pined for Kato Kaelin, the “Dancing Itos” were doing their Rockettes number on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Norm Macdonald was ruining his career by landing joke upon joke about O. J. (I still regularly watch the YouTube clips of his infamous and damned funny jokes about the trial). And, of course, we first heard a name that we had no idea would become so ubiquitous today: Kardashian.

The racial divide the trial and acquittal exposed was indeed strong. When O. J. was found not guilty, like most white people, I was shocked while black people cheered. Even as a preteenager, I could see the evidence was so voluminous and the defense “Dream Team” so smug and self-righteous that “not guilty” couldn’t have possibly been the outcome. I suppose it was not until Ezra Edelman’s masterful 2016 documentary O. J.: Made in America that I truly understood why it all unraveled the way it did.

I am not much a fan of sport (save a live baseball or hockey game every now and then) but, for some reason, I always like sports documentaries. I have no “teams,” I suffer through football season with its requisite nonstop chatter, but I remember crying watching Ken Burns’ Baseball. Go figure. ESPN commissioned an excellent series of sports docs called 30 for 30. Many of the episodes were enthralling, especially the one by Alex Gibney, the only real successor to Errol Morris, though perhaps that’s an unfair comparison given Morris’ canonical strangeness. But the coup de grace was Edelman’s movie—a nearly eight-hour film you wished were eight hours longer. Deserving of its Oscar, I maintain it’s one of the finest films (not just documentaries) I’ve ever seen.

Beginning with O. J.’s rise to prominence as a Heisman Trophy-winner at the University of Southern California whilst also presenting an eagle-eye view of race relations in Los Angeles (with Rodney King’s beating being the catalyst for so much unrest), Edelman weaves the whole thing together so beautifully that it will be, for many years, the final word on the matter though, like all great art, it raises more questions than it answers.

In the film, we essentially have O. J.’s former manager telling us he confessed to the murders privately, we have jurors who fess up to the fact the verdict was not so much about O. J., but as retaliation against the acquittal of the policemen who nearly beat King to death. These items in themselves are maddening because, so many years later, there are still many of us whose hearts go out to the victims of the crime. When O. J. passed away (from a very painful form of cancer—karma?), most people on social media posted pics of Ron and Nicole. That’s the appropriate response.

Still, with his death, I realize how large a figure he loomed in all our lives, at least those of us born in the 1980s. The racial ramifications are still with us and conditions in that arena are perhaps worse than they’ve ever been. Yet, there are those who prefer to remember his athleticism. I rewatched Made in America this last weekend and, I must confess, watching him play football in historic footage was akin to watching a prima ballerina perfecting a Tour Jetée. He was remarkable player, but also a remarkably flawed human being. He lived a phony life. His charming smile belied the reality that he was a typical wife beater whose rage and jealousy, almost Othello-like, finally overcame him and brought about his downfall. The story of Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown is indeed a tragedy. O. J.’s story, however, is a tragedy on the scale of Ancient Greek tragedy—perhaps the most precipitous fall for any major contemporary figure that we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

Now he’s gone, but our situation hasn’t improved. If anything, that verdict divided whites and blacks in an irrevocable sense. All the activists working on his behalf at the time—often as smug as the folks sitting at the defense table—made sure that race was the defining factor, the truth, the DNA, the obviousness, be damned. If he had been found guilty, perhaps L. A. would have turned Bedlam again, just like the riots of the ‘60s and ‘90s.

Racism in America is not a situation we will ever really live down, I fear. The stains of slavery will never be truly washed away. O. J.’s case simply put all the cards on the table (the race card, an unfortunate term, especially) and we watched with rabid interest. Then, because of Court TV and the like, we entered a new world where so-called “trials of the century” pop up every ten years or so. None of them, however, reach the level of societal significance that that trial did—its implications weigh on us every single day. That was the true “Trial of the Century” (at least in the U. S.)—maybe even a pivotal part of our national history, sadly to say.

Maybe that’s the greatest tragedy of all.

Christopher Durang (1949-2024)

Christopher Durang

Christopher Durang was a playwright and actor from Montclair, New Jersey. He wrote the plays Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Tony Award), Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, Adrift in Macao, Miss Witherspoon (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Mrs. Bob Crachit’s Wild Christmas Binge, Betty’s Summer Vacation (Obie Award), Sex and Longing, Laughing Wild, The Marriage of Bette and Boo (Obie Award), Baby with the Bathwater, Beyond Therapy (adapted into a film co-written by Durang), Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (Obie Award, adapted into a telefilm by Durang), The Vietnamization of New Jersey, and The Idiots Karamazov (with Albert Innaurato). His short plays include Wanda’s Visit, A Stye of the Eye, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, The Actor’s Nightmare, Titanic, Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes, ‘dentity Crisis, and The Nature and Purpose of the Universe. In addition, he wrote the book and lyrics for the musical A History of the American Film. For television, he wrote for the series My America, Trying Times, and Comedy Zone in addition to co-writing the telefilm Off-Hollywood. As an actor, he appeared in the films The Out-of-Towners (re-make), Simply Irresistible, The Cowboy Way, Life with Mikey, HouseSitter, The Butcher’s Wife, and The Secret of My Success as well as episodes of Frasier and Tales from the Crypt. He graduated from the Yale School of Drama and Harvard University. He died in Pipersville, Pennsylvania.

An inspiring book.

I had written three plays by 1998 and had caught the bug, as it were. Back then, I averaged only a couple of hours of sleep at night. One can do that at that age, I suppose. I was up on one of these long nights and picked up a book on my nightstand that I had borrowed from the Alabama School of Fine Arts’ (ASFA) play library—it’s the same copy I have now as most of my teacher’s collection was bequeathed to me. The book was Christopher Durang: 27 Short Plays. I said, “My. 27. Better write another one if I’m to keep up” and, later that night, my first play edging toward maturity, A Plumber’s Story, was composed. I realize this is not a story about Durang’s work inspiring me, but more about his voluminous bibliography, but it was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news that Durang had passed away due to aphasia, with which he had been living for some time. It should be noted that many of the plays in the above-mentioned collection have given me years of laughter. I suppose the first thing folks of when they see a Durang play is how funny they are. But, beneath that exterior was a weeping heart for the folly of humankind and an anger toward the follies of the world. As far as the theatre is concerned, he was our great satirist—mostly of beloved institutions, but also of society itself.

Durang was a student at Harvard University during the age of the Vietnam protests. The University decided to address these on-campus protests with a pamphlet which was slipped under every dormitory door. The pamphlet was entitled, “The Nature and Purpose of the University.” Glancing at it, Durang thought he read “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe.” The idea that Harvard would put their official stance on such an existentialist idea amused him and a play emerged with that same title. As usual, it was very, very funny.

Yes, that's Durang with Julie Andrews in PUTTING IT TOGETHER.

Later, he attended the Yale School of Drama with his friend Sigourney Weaver and where he was mentored by the late director/critic Robert Brustein. Durang often turned in assignments that ignored all rubric, which delighted Brustein. At Yale, Durang formed a cabaret act with Weaver called Das Lusitania Songspiel and Durang would even accompany Weaver when she hosted Saturday Night Live (and appeared as himself in a Church Chat sketch (Well, isn’t that special?). While he wasn’t particularly known as a performer, he did so sporadically through his life. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment in that arena was playing the Commentator in the Stephen Sondheim revue Putting it Together. A cast recording of the original production featuring his performance is available.

As for his plays, he had a rocky start in New York where theatre sizes often dwarfed his rather modest staging needs. A very funny long one-act called Titanic, which featured Weaver as a little girl stuffing lettuce up her dress amidst the biting jabs of a bickering husband and wife aboard the ill-fated ship, did well in its first small house, but as it moved Off-Broadway, it had much the same critical problems of the 1997 musical Titanic. A critic need only describe the show itself as a sinking ship (how original) and the run was cut short.

Yours truly, at left, in 'DENTITY CRISIS.

Another early play he wrote in school, ‘dentity Crisis, in which I played Robert in a production at ASFA is a perfect encapsulation of what Durang does best. In it, a clearly sane young woman has been institutionalized for being crazy while it is, in fact, her family that is in desperate need of medical attention. In the play, the character of Robert (in which I was cast) must continually change in and out of several characters (onstage, often within the same line) from being the young woman’s father, grandfather, brother, and mother’s lover. The part was daunting but, of the comic roles I played, it is the one of which I was most proud. I would call the play both side-splittingly funny and terrifying. That is the world Durang depicts: both equally tragic and comic. Sadly, comic playwrights always get short shrift in America as if what they do is somehow lower than naturalistic drama. Hence, it was rather late in life that Durang finally won the Tony for the Chekov-inspired Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, perhaps one of the few plays written since the 2010s that is both crowd-pleasing and masterfully written. This more than made up for his first foray on Broadway: a crash-and-burn turn as the librettist and lyricist for A History of the American Film, with a score by Mel Marvin. Much admired in regional productions, somehow the show didn’t land in New York, though productions appear every now and again in the heartland.

The original Sis. Mary Ignatius.

As it was, Durang’s breakthrough came with a scathing attack on his religious upbringing. The abrasive, even shocking Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (which was adapted into a television film with Diane Keaton years later) premiered in 1979, with the lovable The Actor’s Nightmare as a curtain-raiser. The play is a reunion of Sis. Mary Ignatius’ Sunday School class as adults and shows the result of an all-too common phenomenon among lapsed Catholics. Those raised in the pre-Vatican II era had orthodoxy shoved down their throats and largely rejected religion as adults. Disappointed in her students, Sis. Mary ends up murdering them to save their souls.

BEYOND THERAPY onstage (with a young Niles at left).

The 1980s were perhaps Mr. Durang’s most fertile years beginning with Beyond Therapy. While that play—a simple conceit (the doctors are crazier than the patients, with a love story front and center)—also failed in its New York premiere, but it has gone on to become a staple of regional theatres with its small cast size, short zippy scenes, and virtually no major staging requirements. In reviewing Robert Altman’s film adaptation of the play, Leonard Maltin called it “paper-thin” and perhaps there is an argument for that, but the dialogue always seems to sparkle if the overall play doesn’t have much deep to say regarding neuroticism.

BEYOND THERAPY on film, with the Fly.

That 1987 film adaptation soured Durang on working in Hollywood. While credited as a co-screenwriter, he must have been unaware that Altman used screenplays as jumping off points and often left writers feeling like second or third bananas. From my point of view, Altman’s film basically tells Durang’s play straight, but these scenes are juxtaposed with awkwardly inserted shots of nosy extras and other oddments that distract from the simple story. Altman himself, at that time, was at a low point, adapting plays for television and film and Beyond Therapy is often considered one of his worst films overall. Those people must not have seen the same year’s O. C. and Stiggs (shot in ’84 but released in ’87).

However, the 80s also saw three highly respected plays from Durang—Baby with the Bathwater, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and Laughing Wild. Largely, Durang’s reputation rests upon these plays. They are what great comic theatre should be. One moment, your jaws on the ground and the other you can barely stay in your seat. Durang made you uncomfortable, of course, but he saw the comedy in the bleakest of life’s intricacies. Perhaps there is a comfort in knowing the abyss but also laughing at it.

FOR WHOM THE SOUTHERN BELLE TOLLS.

The ‘90s were a mixed bag for many playwrights who dominated the ‘80s. Durang’s apparently too on-the-nose Media Amok was ridiculed at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston (no version of the play has ever been published), but his evening of one-acts Durang Durang (get it?) included razor sharp parodies of the plays of Tennessee Williams (For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, maybe the greatest parody in the history of the theatre) and Sam Shepard (A Stye of the Eye). Finally, in the 2000s, his Miss Witherspoon became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, his closest shot at being recognized for the mastery with which he wove comedy and tragedy. Durang spent the rest of his working life training playwrights at Julliard with Pulitzer Prize-winner Marsha Norman. I’m sure his students benefited from his askance view of the world and skill in navigating minefield-like subjects in his plays.

Perhaps my favorite Durang piece is a comic sketch he wrote for a Carol Burnett special. The Funeral Parlor, a vehicle for Burnett and Robin Williams, was aired twice in the special—both the version as written and a version in which Williams did his typical rapid-fire ad-libbing to try to break up everyone in the room. You can guess which version I preferred (It’s in 27 Plays—check it out).

As a friend pointed out, the world is less funny without Durang. But it also has lost a true satirist—someone who held up the mirror to our iniquities and scalded us with small doses of boiling hot water when we needed it. May he rest in peace, free from the bonds of the world that puzzled and pained him and may he bring laughter to the afterlife.

The Truth Narrative: Ross E. Cheit & Witch Hunts

Last week, in reviewing Netflix’ new docuseries The Outreau Case: A French Nightmare, I brusquely went over a subject near and dear—the daycare sex abuse scandals of the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. In addition to the books I recommended to you (by Richard Beck, Debbie Nathan, etc.), there are a litany of other articles and books on the subject. For the McMartin trial in particular the resources of Paul and Shirley Eberle are indispensable (read The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial and The Politics of Child Abuse).

However, for those of you interested in the subject, you might come across another book: Ross E. Cheit’s The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children. While it may seem strange to criticize a book from ten years ago, it has implications that threaten to turn what they call today the “narrative” in Cheit’s favor. If Cheit had been successful, it would have revictimized the victims. As it is, there is no book I’m more ashamed to own than his. In fact, Oxford University Press should be ashamed for publishing it.

A handsomely designed and well-cited volume, Cheit attempts to “take back” the narrative by claiming, through what I’m sure was arduous research, that abuse did occur in all of the cases. Needless to say, the “Satanic Panic” has been thoroughly debunked and none of the convictions (save one, thanks to the blindered view of Janet Reno) have ever held muster. Because, again, nothing happened.

It was an example of rampant mass hysteria—a moral panic I hope we never go through again as a society. Cheit has continued periodically to add to his case through blog posts on his website. The extent to which his book is taken seriously, I can’t be sure. When it first arrived, the Catholic Church cases and Penn State were happening and actual child abuse was being taken seriously. Since then, particularly after the last seven years, the subject of sexual abuse in general has been so widespread, I fear Cheit’s tome will reach the hands of those not intelligent enough to see the smoke screen Cheit weaves.

It is a delicate subject, so I will try to go easy on him. In point of fact, Cheit should have never written the book given he himself was the subject of child sex abuse. In elder language, he has a dog in the fight. He desperately wants the children to be believed as we non-deluded folk want the real victims (those accused) to be believed and fully exonerated. To mention that I feel for Dr. Cheit’s childhood experience should go without saying, but the subject being what it is, his work would be akin to someone who had been robbed trying to find guilt in everyone accused of theft. It is an impossibility and, in the end, sad.

I’m beginning to hate the word “narrative” in its contemporary context. Other words like iconic, gaslighting, lenses, etc. follow suit for me. They sound intelligent and, given their wide-spread usage through social media, I think people feel they’re smart when they use them, but really it is just an example of everyone talking like everyone else. Given the internet’s ubiquity (and I realize the irony as you’re reading this online), we will all eventually have no culture, no words specific to region, no color to our speech due to the internet autocorrecting not only our thoughts, but our ideas. Just as I typed this, the computer changed “auto-correcting” to “autocorrecting.”

Professor Cheit’s book is aptly titled given his premise. He goes through all the cases—with the most weight given to McMartin—and cherry picks “evidence” from the trials to spin the narrative back to something happened even if it did not revolve around Satanic Ritual Abuse (another myth that got caught up in the mix). Cheit opened old wounds that had not even healed in a (probably) sincere attempt to recapture the public’s imagination from a different side, given the fact that he had supposed eagle-eyed vision, writing nearly a decade after the last cases were winding down.

In the end, Cheit’s book might as well be a proponent of the flat-earth theory. The nearly one hundred pages of footnotes (that often attack good-faith writers critical of the trials at the time and after, especially the Eberles) could denote to the undiscerning reader that Cheit knows what he’s talking about. This is a Professor at an Ivy League institution, of course. But I’ve read books where half the page-length is devoted to notes and often see it as simple over-compensating for avoiding the truth.

I bought Cheit’s book as soon as I heard of it. I’ll admit I bought it under the presupposition that Cheit agreed with virtually every psychological and sociological assessment of the situation, but I was wrong. I should have gathered his argument from the title, but I was so consumed by the subject at the time, that I didn’t even read the blurb. When the book arrived at home, I dove head-first into it as I often do with non-fiction (fiction takes a lot more time for me to digest and process). It is a book of utter delusion from (again, I think) a sincere human being who wants to “believe the children.”

That catchphrase, used by Beck for his concise telling of the McMartin case, was on many a hastily-put-together poster board in the ‘80s. If you even dared to question the cases at that time, you were open to death threats and all kinds of chicanery. In fact, after HBO premiered Indictment: The McMartin Trial, the Mann home (Abby and Myra Mann, the screenwriters) was burned to the ground, most likely by McMartin parents who still, according to a recent Oxygen documentary, still believe something happened.

I feel for Cheit’s childhood psychological scars, but his book is one of many which proves all you have to do is twist evidence and shape-shift quotes to prove your point. Harold Bloom noted, correctly, in the mid-‘90s that a feminist or Marxist reading of a play by William Shakespeare will teach you a lot about feminism and Marxism, but not anything about the play. Included in this is the various Freudian readings of Sophokles and Shakespeare. His views tell you something about Freudianism, not about the great tragedies of antiquity. Likewise, Cheit cuts the cloth to fit his fashion and presents his own “narrative.”

And Freud is a good note to end on. Because of his salacious (and wrong) Seduction Theory which even he recanted, the world caught onto the idea of repressed memories in the ‘80s. Such cases broke up many homes and destroyed countless lives and they are related to the false memories implanted by therapists in the daycare cases. While Cheit is not as good a writer as Freud (the most generous thing I can say about Freud is he was a gifted creative essayist but not in any way a clinician), they both espouse/d ideas dangerous to society. The truth rarely matters.

Or at least we hope it does.