Boys’ Life
As you might expect from a white, male middle-class playwright who hit his stride in the 1980s, Howard Korder is adept at combining tired ideas in conventional ways that reveal nothing new. In The Lights, for example, he took an expressionistic style of playwriting that was old hat when Elmer Rice co-opted it in his 1923 hit The Adding Machine and married it to a melodramatic story about the evils of urban life, a story D.W. Griffith would have been comfortable with: the poor are unclean and dress badly, the rich love to prey on innocent shopgirls.
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For me, however, the best example of Korder’s crypto-conservative aesthetic will always be his 1988 watered-down version of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Korder’s Boys’ Life, about three white middle-class men adrift in the 80s, begins by asking a mildly interesting question: Why are white middle- class heterosexual men in their 20s so alienated and immature? Then the play provides the very 80s backlash- ridden answer: Because the women in their lives castrate them at every turn, that’s why. Now get off my back!
Tauber’s technique also helps reveal what is often invisible to the white middle-class heterosexual mainstream: that Korder’s point of view is not an objective reflection of reality but only the opinion of flawed, spoiled yuppie white boys. Suddenly Korder’s unsatisfying answers don’t seem like answers at all; they’re only the glib rationalizations of immature men searching frantically for an explanation of why they’re so unsettled and unhappy.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo/Ben Byer.
