I think it could be easily dramatized in Pinter-esque fashion with seven scenes of parents and relatives outside the door of what is intended to be a child's bedroom or even in a living room just alluding to the presence of a sleeping child in the house. Change of costumes and actors for different periods in history if desired.
I see no problem with the work in staging or in being a play or having dramatic form.
The problems I see with it are entirely with its content and its premise. Since it's set-up is all about how you raise children, and she is stuck on the idea of it always being a female child, she is creating a scenario of implying there must be Jewish "hiding" of things from the child with a strong indication of implied Jewish guilt.
The fact she is using, and I really mean using in the manipulative sense, a female child is also troubling to me. The female child is generally considered the more vulnerable that parents try harder to protect, but also under strict Jewish law, only a Jewish woman can bear Jewish children so the continuity of Judaism itself has traditionally depended upon her. The implication is that the parents are discussing withholding facts or truth from those who will continue Judaism. There is a perversity and nastiness in this manipulative set-up of the play that I don't like, as though to attempt to distract and manipulate the audience response to Churchill's personal beliefs by a cagey no-win set-up.
The equivalent of asking the question "How many times a week do you beat your wife?"
Yes, that is what I do not like about the play and the play reflects upon the author. Now some authors have had periods when they felt a certain way and wrote about it and then changed their minds, and you look at an overall body of work, but that doesn't insulate from being taken to task when they do something lousy.
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Updated On: 6/23/09 at 02:21 PM
