Lainie read and liked David's review of King Richard III:

"William Shakespeare has demanded an awful lot of me over the years. For example, he has expected me to believe that men can -- regularly and with relative ease -- pass for women (and vice versa) even though we all know from casually espying that 6'2"...more William Shakespeare has demanded an awful lot of me over the years. For example, he has expected me to believe that men can -- regularly and with relative ease -- pass for women (and vice versa) even though we all know from casually espying that 6'2" post-op tranny with the strong jawline at the Lord & Taylor's cosmetics counter that even the most diligent efforts of science have rarely yielded an entirely convincing result. And to those of you who were shocked by Jaye Davidson's phallus unveiling in The Crying Game, I have two pieces of advice for you: (1) Come in from the cornfields please, Maynard, and (2) you might want to recollect more critically some of the people you've dated over the past twenty or so years. You might be more sexually progessive than you ever imagined.

In addition to tranvestism, mistaken identities, ludicrous coincidences, and an odd supporting performance from a bear in A Winter's Tale, Shakespeare expects me to believe that a devoted wife can be easily seduced by her husband's hunchbacked murderer before the corpse has even been borne away. Literally, one minute she's bent over the casket, dabbing her tears, and the next she's checking out Richard III's buns and saying, "Shit, I'd like to break me off a piece o' that!" (Paraphrase.)

Really, the alleged charms and powers of seduction of Dick 3 that Shakespeare expects the viewer (or reader) to countenance in this play are a bit much, but I suppose none of this fodder would've been terribly out of place on a 1990s chair-throwing talk show ("Men Who Are Dogs and the Women Who Love Them"). In this scenario, perhaps, Lady Anne, the widow seduced by Richard III, is not all that different from the bobbing-and-weaving fourteen-year-old girl who's dating a fifty-year-old pedophile Klansman with no teeth and a penchant for female circumcision.

But we can't evade the facts: Divested of its poetical content, its drama and outrage, The Tragedy of King Dick 3 is pretty ridiculous. It's naggingly perplexing why, within the parameters set up by Shakespeare, no one is able to subdue this oily cripple with a Trump complex. I mean, he's always making these voluble asides, with his enemies in the room, about what devious plans he's hatched, but even beyond all that, the only signs and signals of his evilness omitted from the play are hooves and the playing of "Tubular Bells" every time he enters the room.

Suspension of disbelief is a difficult contortion of our intellects in this profoundly cynical age in which we live. Unless a work of art is coded with flashing lights and circus organs as absurd, we tend to expect some semblance of reality from our art -- which is why I was outraged quite a few years ago when I saw the "thriller" The Temp with Lara Flynn Boyle as a psychopathic office temp worker (I think she works with me now) who sabotages a cookie marketing campaign by putting broken glass in the cookies and who is "found out" by her employer because the family photo on her desk is the photo that came with the frame. I mean, c'mon, people! She's cunning enough to birth plots within schemes within machinations, but she somehow imagines that no one trolling the aisles at K-Mart will notice that her husband is a professional picture frame model. (And, besides, wouldn't he have a UPC code over his groin anyway?)

What is my point? My point is that, even given the sensationalistic plot and the libelous portrayal of Dick 3 (who wasn't really evil in real life), this play is the shit. Shakespeare, I will suspend my disbelief for you anyday. (Oh... but I just remembered those stupid over-the-counter death potions from the end of Romeo and Juliet. Now those were soooo late-era Melrose Place.)(less) "