Standing on the beach...

Just returned from "The Strangerer," which was fairly frickin' brilliant. Like "The Hunchback Variations," (another Mickle Maher Theatre Oobleck thing) it's that long slow intellectual burn kind of hilarious. Again, like "Hunchback," it's a series of attempts to get at an unreachable moment of meaning and/or truth, except this time, the artistic agent is President Bush, and the medium is the 2004 foreign policy debate. Bush has been conflated with the lead character of Camus's "The Stranger,"* and has decided, for reasons that he is immable to enticulate, that he must kill Jim Lehrer in as entertaining a fashion as possible.

(At this point, Reina goes to read a wiki summary of "The Stranger" and is unenlightened. Where is your sterling liberal education now, fraulein?)

Even if, like me, you are totally ignorant of Camus, this is a lot of fun, and throws a properly absurdist penumbra around President Bush and his mission in Iraq. Plus, Colm O'Reilly!**


*Remember when Bush said he read that? Snicker.

**Disclaimer: At the time of posting, your correspondent is half-way through her badly delayed best of 2006 awards. As Colm O'Reilly has been a planned recipient of one award for some months now, we had really intended to get that out before seeing "The Strangerer." We would not want any hint of impropriety to smudge the Loopies, up to and including the notion that any shows seen in 2007 could influence awards for 2006. Sorry. You're going to have to take my word on this.