Over the course of three plays—Asuncion, The Revisionist, and The Spoils—Jesse Eisenberg has established himself as the premier satirist of guilt-ridden, ineffectual American liberalism. His work is littered with a gaggle of narcissistic, white idiots, and Happy Talk, his latest, is no exception. This is the first of his plays in which Eisenberg does not […]
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Jesse Eisenberg has gotten angrier. His first play, Asuncion, was a merciless takedown of white, liberal politics, but at its center was a genuinely warm if dysfunctional love story. His follow-up, The Revisionist, was admittedly colder, pitting a self-absorbed, pretentious writer against a savvy, Polish Holocaust survivor. But The Spoils, now being produced by The New Group at […]
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David (Jesse Eisenberg), the protagonist of Mr. Eisenberg’s new play, bears some resemblance to Edgar, the part he played in Asuncion, his first work for the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater: he is an entitled, pot smoking vegetarian whose condescension does not prevent him from prefacing every sentence with, “Sorry.” But unlike Edgar, David is not particularly […]
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There is a moment in James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—possibly the pinnacle of white liberal guilt—in which Agee accidentally startles a young Black couple: “I was trying in some fool way to keep it somehow relatively light, because I could not bear that they should receive from me any added […]
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