A panning in New York

I haven't seen Martin McDonagh's new play A Behanding In Spokane and I probably won't get to; this blistering New Yorker review made me sit up because of its assertion that the play is broadly racist. Hilton Als goes a step further and seems to implicate African-American actor Anthony Mackie (The Hurt Locker) for his acceptance of a caricatured role. I'm not sure how much an actor can be held responsible for embodying an author's disagreeable vision, but it is an argument worth having.

What one does notice throughout this exchange is Mackie’s behavior. He performs as though he were Stepin Fechit in a room full of bickering ghosts. Toby’s characterization is as offensive as the language used to describe him. While Carmichael’s “nigger” talk could be put down to an attempt of McDonagh’s to expose the nastiness of a segment of the population—many writers have used ugly language to paint an honest portrait of racism in this country—the caricature he presents in Toby, the young black male as shucking, jiving thief, can’t be excused on those grounds, or by the slick professionalism that coats the play’s intellectual decay. McDonagh adds gag after gag to the show, as if he believed that comedy could cover up the real horror at its core: the fact that blackness is, for him, a Broadway prop, an easy way of establishing a hierarchy.