TWERE, THE MIRROR UP TO NATURE"
_ By Arthur Maglin
MacBird, by Barbara Garson. Grassy Knoll Press, P.O. Box 2273, Grand Central Station, New York, N.Y. 10017. #1.
MacBird, an as yet unproduced play which burlesques President Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and several other important figures in the American government, has received an unusual amount of critical attention and praise in important American journals and from well-known critics.
MacBird, written by Barbara Garson, parodies Shakespeare's Macbeth. Lyndon Johnson is cast in the role of Macbeth and renamed MacBird. Lady Bird Johnson becomes Lady MacBird.
Robert Brustein, Dean of the Yale Drama School, writing in the September 25,. 1966 New York Times Sunday Magazine, comments: "Although the play is bound to start a storm of protest (not all of it unjustified) and may even be suppressed by some government agency, it will very probably go down as one of the brutally provocative works in the American theater, as well as one of the most grimly amusing.”
The famous American poet, Robert Lowell, has said of MacBird: "I have nothing to say about the political truth of this play, but I am sure a kind of genius has gone ~~ into the writing."
Eric Bentley, a well-known theater critic and Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University, writes: "If I were a producer, I would produce MacBird at once in as many American cities as possible. I would then sell it for production abroad so that the rest of the world might (a) be warned against the 'American way of life' and (b). take note that the warning came from an American writer."
The December 1 issue of The New York Review of Books carries a featured review of MacBird by the well-known critic Dwight Macdonald. Macdonald opens his