Plays By Jonathan Reynolds

RUBBERS and YANKS 3 DETROIT 0 TOP OF THE SEVENTH:   “...they were undeniably funny...    RUBBERS has a young woman member of the Assembly desperately trying to get a bill through that would require pharmacists to place contraceptives on public display. The response this receives from her fellow members is immediate, explosive and often very amusing. Mr Reynolds offers some whimsical caricatures of Assemblymen...    In the second play, Mr Reynolds does keep rather closer to the real world, with an aging, fading baseball pitcher who is on his way out and frantically knows it. With his ethnic jokes and crass materialism there is nothing very attractive about Emil (Duke) Bronkowski paranoidly facing high noon on the mound. And yet seeing him assailed by the opposing team—all markedly younger and mocking men—his own catcher (he has the only catcher in the major leagues who wants his pitcher to call him “Mister!“) and his coach...one has to  feel some basic sympathy.“ Clive Barnes, The New York TimesFIGHTING INTERNATIONAL FAT:   “Jonathan Reynolds is a playwright with what may be a quixotic goal. He proposes to appeal to intelligent theatergoers the old-fashioned way, by providing an experience that expands the audience’s vision instead of reaffirming what it already knows....    In FIGHTING INTERNATIONAL FAT, two women—leading diet promoters—are locked in a titanic struggle for the opportunity to proselytize their respective positions on a leading television talk show, presided over by the man who happens to be `the sex object of every red-blooded American woman’. Both women will stop at nothing to win over the talk show host, who is under pressure to provide his voracious viewers with revelations five days a week.“ Gaby Rogers, The New York TimesSTONEWALL JACKSON’S HOUSE:   “The gloves come off early in STONEWALL JACKSON’S HOUSE, Jonathan Reynolds’ caustic comic tirade against political orthodoxy. A woebegone black guide leading a group through the haphazardly restored home of the Confederate general suddenly stops the tour to ask a well-to-do white couple from Ohio if she can come home with them, as their slave.    It’s a provocative moment: where is this playwright, who so deliciously savaged film making fifteen years ago in GENIUSES, headed with this tasteless conceit? Mercifully, not to a scene depicting modern slavery. The revolving panels of the play’s simple set are eventually pushed aside to reveal the rehearsal room of a small theater company whose self-righteous administrators, interviewing playwrights for the new season, denounce the play the audience has just sampled.    With that, Mr Reynolds climbs on his soapbox for an ambling, funny, cranky and highly entertaining diatribe against all the agenda-laden forces and high-minded programs (especially of the liberal stripe) that he believes have conspired to wring common sense out of American political and cultural life.    Affirmative action, political correctness, nontraditional casting, the welfare state, black studies, ethnocentrism, multiculturalism: Mr Reynolds pushes so many buttons he could have staged the play in an elevator....    You don’t have to agree with Mr Reynolds’ inexhaustible supply of opinions to get a kick out of this....    The plot of STONEWALL JACKSON’S HOUSE takes several outrageous turns, culminating in a hilariously radical restaging of the tour-guide scene along lines more politically palatable to the theater company’s old guard....    But maybe a little more unvarnished spleen-venting is just what the theater needs.“ Peter Marks, The New York Times