Like It Is
One such artist is Johnathan McClain. American theater needs him the way constipated old men need high colonics. Hell, the entire nation needs him. A country that confuses USA Today with a newspaper, and talk-show hysteria with informed debate, desperately needs a mainline infusion of Truth–which is exactly what McClain delivers in his devastatingly accurate, wildly entertaining one-man show Like It Is.
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Under Chuck Huber’s crisp direction, McClain takes us on a front-line walking tour of America’s often-overlooked intraclass war, in which the powerless ambush one another in petty skirmishes gussied up as liberationist insurrections. The world McClain creates is all too familiar. The recent rioters in South Central Los Angeles, for example, ostensibly striking back at a racist and classist judicial system, torched and plundered their own communities but left the Beverly Hills estates untouched.
But as playwright Lee Blessing points out, the opposite of innocence is not guilt. It’s knowledge. And for McClain, as for Mamet, what’s missing in our national psyche is self-knowledge. As McClain opined after the show, “There is no accountability in this country.” But unlike his characters, McClain doesn’t point fingers or lay blame. With great empathy he zeroes in on the humanity of his characters. They may be deeply flawed, often deluded, but they are not monsters. On the contrary they’re all too human, and finally wondrous and delightful. For all its unsparing social commentary, Like It Is is very funny. We laugh at McClain’s characters for the same reasons we laugh at Mamet’s petty crooks and high-powered operators: because they reveal too much of what we already know to be true about human nature.
