Mangy Terrier

MacBird! by Barbara Garson has been awaited with all the fierce anticipatory noises surrounding a tumbrel arriving at the guillotine. Long before the play's off-Broadway opening last week, an honor guard of coterie intellectuals, including Critic Dwight Macdonald and Yale Drama School Dean Robert Brustein, went into tub-thumping ecstasy over MacBird, which promised a dramatic severing of President Johnson's head. In addition, it capitalized emotionally on a winter of public discontent with L.B.J.--the poll-recorded loss of favor with the electorate, the supposed credibility gap, concern about Viet Nam, Johnson's embroilment with the Kennedy clan.

After viewing Playwright Garson's pennywhistle jeremiad, most theatergoers may conclude that its literary advocates could double as circus shills.

In reality, MacBird is a mangy little terrier of a satire, nipping at the trouser cuffs of the mighty. Its bark is its bite. Holier than thou in its complacency and self-indulgently assured of how In-funny it is, MacBird is an off-campus transplant of college humor.

Playwright Garson's conceit is to parody and paraphrase Macbeth; President Johnson is represented in the title role and Mrs. Johnson is Lady Macbeth. King Duncan, renamed John Ken O'Dunc, is clearly President Kennedy, and Duncan's sons become Bobby and Teddy. Nothing loath to be malicious, Garson argues that MacBird (Stacy Keach) lures John Ken O'Dunc to his Texas ranch and arranges his assassination in order to become king, while his henchmen sabotage Teddy Ken O'Dunc's airplane. In hand-to-hand combat with Bobby Ken O'Dunc, MacBird dies of a heart attack, and Bobby assumes the crown.

"Is there no offense in it?" King Claudius might ask. Despite MacBird's slanderous premise, the answer is: amazingly little. Playwright Garson fuzzes up the key event to the point that it cannot be taken seriously as an intimation of reality. Shots are heard, but MacBird, unlike Macbeth, is never seen with the murder weapon; nothing really connects him with the crime, except a panting desire for advancement and a few veiled hints and innuendoes.

No consistent tone can be imparted to a play that juxtaposes the somber drum roll of the Kennedy funeral cortege with such inane Shakespearean mutations as "Oh whine and pout/ That ever I was born to bury doubt." But MacBird's basic flaw is that Playwright Garson is a frivolous, scattershot satirist who has no moral vision of her own to counterpose whatever might be regarded as evil in her characters. She has written an apolitical play in which all choices seem silly. The Ken O'Duncs are presented as chilly, ruthless opportunists; MacBird is a mixture of corn-pone cajolery, scheming ambition and bullwhip arrogance.

Another sign of Playwright Garson's ineptitude as a satirist is her determination to testify in the courtroom of drama to so many things she knows to be not true. Her tactic for showing aversion to the Viet Nam war is not to question the logic of that war but to imply that Johnson, like Macbeth, has "supped full with horrors" and is an unfeeling, bloody-minded monster. Unwilling to concede the humanity of others, she reduces her characters to caricatures. They eventually take their revenge by draining MacBird of most of its fun and all of its life.

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