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[Will Franken's Grampa It's Not Fitting plays at The Marsh in San Francisco until September. Tickets and info at www.themarsh.org and 415-826-5750]
Will Franken
Nailing Political Correctness To A Cross
Grandpa It's Not Fitting
By Will Franken
Reviewed by Ed Brownson
There is one sketch - and only one - among the many in Will Franken's solo show Grandpa It's Not Fitting at The Marsh that is laugh-out-loud funny. Franken portrays a corporate-style motivational speaker selling small businesses on the virtue of "embracing diversity" to boost their bottom line. The trick, Franken explains, is to understand the difference between "real" activism and "business" activism.
"Real" activists take to the streets, get arrested, refuse to pay taxes, etcetera, attempting to change society. "Business" activism doesn't mess with any of that. Rather than associate with those sweaty, pushy, passionate "real activist" types - and the risk of bad press - "business" activists embrace change only after the battle's won, or has at least won consensus. When diversity's already part of the culture, the embracing is easy.
Franken uses the "LGBT" acronym as an example. Lesbians and gays are OK, he tells us, and great for profits too. With major corporations plastering the Castro with banner ads, that battle is over. As to bisexuals, while a few out there may still have issues about them, as most everybody's tried everything in every conceivable combination at least once these days, there's really no downside. On the other hand, Franken's motivational trainer asks, what the hell is a "transgender?" The very word sounds icky. Business activists better not embrace the "T" of LGBT too closely.
We get to heartily laugh at this sketch because the San Francisco audience for shows like Franken's is overwhelmingly liberal leaning and "right" thinking - right as in proper, not right-wing. It's easy to laugh when virtually everybody around you shares your biases and you know it. To put it another way, this town is, almost to a person, "politically correct."
Yet Franken's target here is not business hypocrisy but the hypocrisy of political correctness. Franken is trying to break through the thick shellac of PC that our society has gleefully painted around itself. This point becomes clear as the show progresses: Most of his sketches are discomforting, some bringing out irritation and even anger in the audience.
I admit it: Franken pissed me off too, and with the opening sketch. In his notorious "Mrs. Wit" interview, he imagines a phone conversation between a Hollywood-type booking agent and the woman dying of ovarian cancer out of which Margaret Edson's Pulitzer-winning play Wit was created. He presses the dying woman to decide who she wants to play her part after she's gone. Tacky, at some moments a dictionary definition of poor taste and yet at others, embarrassingly hilarious, the skit pushed hard on my own notions of correctness. A loss of someone very dear to me to that awful disease didn't help. I squirmed in my seat, and if I could have walked out I probably would have.
But as the evening went on, I gradually came to understand what Franken was doing. Slowly, methodically, he deconstructs the PC mindset and shows it for the corrosion of thought it really is. He started with a sledgehammer in order to get our attention.
After he's limbered our minds, Franken takes us into our attitudes about radical Islam and terrorism. He puts us on a plane with a terrorist intent on unleashing a bomb in the name of Allah, only to find his goal frustrated when the plane falls out of the sky on its own accord. This skit pokes our sensitivities in so many different ways it is amazing. We sit in shock as Franken-as-terrorist pleads with his fellow passengers to claim, should they survive the crash, that he did it He blew up the plane.
Franken mentions how the Islamic reaction to the infamous Danish cartoons on terrorism and Islam really pissed him off. Nobody in the audience laughed or agreed or disagreed with him, even though I suspect we all (or most all) do agree on that point. But we sat there, frozen, looking about as if we were eight-year olds searching for cues on how to react.
Franken displays one of the cartoons depicting Mohammed wearing a bomb in his turban. The discomfort in the room was palpable, lessening only when Franken flips the page on his pad - to reveal another cartoon, of a woman with a crucifix sticking out a convenient orifice under the slogan, "Fuck me Jesus!" That cartoon got chuckles - at first. But Franken leaves that bit of pornography up, and slowly the uncomfortable point sinks in: Why is it okay to laugh at something blasphemous to Christians but not at something blasphemous to Muslims?
Discomfort indeed.
Not all of Franken's sketches work. In one, he takes on Los Angeles. L.A.'s an easy laugh in the Bay Area, but for a moment, it seemed he was going to say something interesting about the great mega-metro to our south. Instead he does a send up of the stereotype L.A. "dude" (who can't do that?), cracks a couple of run-of-the-mill LaLa jokes, and abandons the subject. And a sketch featuring the Beatles trying to launch their career in the post-modern world of iPods, GarageBand software and the Internet misses the mark completely.
But whenever he returns to his core topic of political correctness, Franken is brilliant. Another example: Franken, dressed as a pious minister in mid-service, has a religious argument with the chorus that goes on and on. Funny, and very much on point.
The worst bit of the evening is Franken's post-show apologia, where he tries to explain what he's done and why. Choosing to tackle political correctness is a courageous stand these days - though it shouldn't be - and he should just leave it there. We'll either get what he's doing, or we won't. We'll either appreciate his efforts, or hate him for it. No amount of niceties will sooth the PC-is-my-religion crowd. So what, Will? You're an artist. You should be pissing people off. That's your job.
I started out hating Franken's show - that irritating Wit bit - but by the end, I found I enjoyed it intensely. More, I found I respected it and what its author-performer is trying to do. I hope he keeps working on it. It's a message that needs to be heard. Highly recommended. You'll be entertained, likely pissed off. And if you're lucky, you'll leave with your own layer of PC shellac a bit thinner.
END
[Will Franken's Grampa It's Not Fitting plays at The Marsh in San Francisco until September. Tickets and info at www.themarsh.org and 415-826-5750]
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On Stage Now!
Theater Reviews by Ed Brownson
Ed Brownson has been writing for the stage for eight years. His plays have been performed in the U.S. and Europe. Recent productions include his one-acts Another Ache and Soul’s Rust as part of Teatro Del Navile’s UAI Festival in Bologna, Italy, May, 2005, and The Dictionary Play in San Francisco’s Bay One-Acts (BOA) Festival, February, 2005. An evening of his short plays is scheduled in Italy in September. Also an essayist, Ed’s meditation on aging and mountains, Fifty at Ten Thousand Feet, was honored by Literary Traveler as part of their Summer Essay contest in 2002. He is currently editing a collection of essays on California titled California / Off Topic: Notes On A State Of Mind, scheduled for release in Spring, 2006. In various previous and parallel lives, Ed is/was a technical writer, a cyclist, cat attendant, and self-proclaimed computer geek. Reach Ed at ed.brownson@bettyslist.com. Read more of his writings at www.edbrownson.net.
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