The Good-Intentions Trap

Don’t feel bad for being dissatisfied with American Son.

- Sara Holdren

AMERICAN SON IS A DREADFUL PLAY—and it’s not alone. When the alien archaeologists dig through the rubble of Manhattan and find mountains of fossilized season brochures, the museum they erect will feature a long, miserable exhibit on the Righteous American Issue Play, ca. 2016 through … someday. Some of these plays are made in bad faith; many aren’t. But nearly all seem to have been produced with an eye to topicality rather than the rigorous development that would turn good faith into good art. These plays bank on their audience’s inability to disentangle content and form, expecting the gravity of their subject matter to carry the day. Because who wants to walk out of a show about black men being murdered by police, or women being harassed and raped, and say, “Well, that was bullshit”? Easier to crawl quietly away, murmuring to your dinner companions that what you’ve just seen was so real, so important—uncertain, if you’re honest with yourself, about what to do with any of it, but certain that you owe yourself a glass of wine and the world a little more guilt and shame.

We are surfeited with these plays. In New York, where the arts are a wokeness war of attrition, they generate an atmosphere that feels like the worst kind of church: a mix of selfcongratulation and self-flagellation. They treat us as if we’ve been living under rocks, or pat us on the back, or both. They advertise themselves as revelators and—by repackaging the headlines in facile, faulty dramatic containers—owe their own public life to the real sorrows they purport to examine. They are programmable simply for the flimsy, translucent raiment they wear, masquerading as cloth of real substance: their “relevance.”