WHAT I LEARNED LAST NIGHT: Last night I saw “Privates on Parade” at the Studio Theater. It’s a musical about SADUSEA (Song And Dance Unit, South East Asia), a British military-entertainment unit that tromps and/or flounces through Malaysia leaving a trail of heartache, smuggled weaponry, and women’s underthings. Here is what I learned from this play–the good stuff first:

1) Floyd King is still fantastic. He’s like a force of nature.

2) The other actors were uniformly (ha ha) very good. The Washington Post review linked above is right about Sunita Param.

3) Costumes, sets: Also good. The Studio is a real class act.

But then there was the play itself. What I learned from the play:

1) You actually can’t make a play about racism, Malaysian history, war as theater, intra-gay debates about assimilation vs. flamboyance, liberal male wuss-outs, Christianity, longing, abortion, the British postwar malaise (oy, I’m very glad they didn’t try some malaise/Malays pun, it would totally be in line with the show’s humor), domestic violence, Communism, and masturbation. I mean, Tony Kushner could probably do it, but he’s a horse of a different feather. The play included scads of potentially biting, moving, complex, and/or hilarious moments, but all received too little time and attention. Scenes were abandoned the moment they threatened to develop into something poignant or funny. If you’ve seen it, I think the clearest example of this unwillingness to do anything with the issues and emotions the play raises was the “Black Velvet” almost-a-scene. Where did that scene go? Nowhere.

2) In 2002, in the District of Columbia, in an artsy independent theater, there is nothing challenging about mocking imperialist Christians, British racists, or anti-Communism.

3) It’s possible to write a musical that is partly about Communists which leaves the impression that: a) The East German government had something to do with “the working classes,” and was possibly even on the side of said classes; b) Cuba’s Batista was replaced by Vaclav Havel; and c) Clement Atlee was more threatening than Mao. I really would rather not even mention this, since it sounds so predictably right-wing, and since the Commie stuff is only thrown in for local color as far as I can tell–Cold War scene-setting, a flash of Red–but it did get in the way of my enjoyment of the musical. I mean, I must have missed that time when British peasant families traded babies with the neighbors so that no family would have to eat its own children to survive. I’m not sure I’m being fair here, since I can’t think what I wanted the show to do–I mean, mass death isn’t all that funny–but this aspect of the evening really did feel “off.”

4) Gay people are funnier in real life. Like, a lot funnier.

5) So are British people.

6) So are gay British people in the military.

7) If your characters are forced to carry too much symbolic weight, eventually anything you do with them will appear stereotyped. “Privates on Parade” made fun of the amount of symbolic baggage its characters held–there’s a very funny bit of dialogue that goes something like, “I’m not just representing a woman being raped–I’m also an Atlantic ship convoy!”–but ultimately several of the characters are the sum total of their Dramatis Personae descriptions: The Eurasian Girl, The Heroine’s Gay Best Friend Who’s The Only Man Who Ever Treated Her Right, The Uptight God-Bothering Empire-Builder Who Prefers Bloodlust To The Other Kind. By the end, pretty much anything the author could have done with these characters would have struck me as fairly crass. If the girl gets the boy, it plays as the native girl needing a white knight to save her; if she gets only the tender care of the Gay Best Friend, well, hello, how cliched is that little “the noble victims of this world stick together!” script?; and if she ends up with no one a’tall, she’s just another tragic mulatta. It is possible to avoid this cliche Catch-22 by writing better characters in the first place.

8) Satire should cost the audience something. (See #2.)