Shel Silverstein Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert Brustein

Critical Essay by Robert Brustein

SOURCE: Brustein, Robert. “Jewish Metaphysics.” New Republic 202 (29 January 1990): 27-8.

In the following essay, Brustein chronicles the themes of guilt and redemption in The Devil and Billy Markham and criticizes the play for lacking variation in both tone and verse.

Lincoln Center Theater is currently engaged, upstairs and downstairs, with plays deriving from Jewish metaphysics, which is to say with devils, demons, and dybbuks. This represents more unity than we've yet seen from this normally eclectic (I hesitate to say expedient) institution. Paddy Chayefsky's The Tenth Man at the Vivian Beaumont is 30 years old, while the two one-act pieces by David Mamet and Shel Silverstein, produced at the smaller Mitzi E. Newhouse under the collective title Oh, Hell, are brand new.

It's nice to find Lincoln Center Theater back at the ranch house after sorties around various Broadway corrals, and even nicer to be able to detect...
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