a critical rebuttal

By Todd Stadler · Tuesday, February 18, 2003 3:43am

Todd Stadler's recent troika of plays, "3 Short Pantomimes about Labor Struggle to be Performed Outside a Large Ground-Level Office Window Inside of Which a Meeting is Taking Place" is to drama what Three's Company was to television.

Which, for those of you who are culturally dull, is to say that it is trite, hackneyed, and dumb.

The main attempts at humor are mainly made in the titles, which are obscenely long and pedantic in a way that suggests that Mr. Stadler is simply being as poor a writer as he knows how to be, all the while hoping that he will, in fact, be perceived as a much better writer who is simply being Ironic.

Furthermore, while Mr. Stadler pays homage to the clich?d comedic Rule of Three, the third panel in his would-be-humorous triptych is rather lacking, and almost certainly composed in an attempt to salvage a sense of professionalism by having written that much more.

However, his thinly-veiled pop culture references and utterly confusing juxtaposition of the allegorical and the merely stupid result in such a quagmire as to leave the viewer questioning his raison d'?tre un playwright, as the French say.

In particular, I found his depiction of those in supervisory positions to be unfair and unreasonable, which is why I have asked that Mr. Stadler be summarily shot and all his gold pieces given to me.

Sincerely,
The Manager
A Critic