Amanda Duarte

Broadway, a 150-year-old electrical parade that chugs through the heart of a theme park, aims to entertain, provoke thought and perhaps inspire change among people from all of life’s many walks. But while New Yorkers welcome the seat-filling currency of all the world’s peoples, American conservatives seeking an affirming theatrical experience in the midtown region of this already-great, immigrant-built city have likely had a hard time buying tickets this season. Yes, it was an especially political 2018–19 season on the Great (cringe) White (cringe) Way! And, surprisingly, the political ideas expressed within an artistic playground owned and operated by coastal-elite snowflakes tended to have a leftward slant! This season’s Broadway shows were eager to handle such currently hot political potatoes as black lives mattering, whether or not women are people, LGBTQ rights, the dangerous power of mentally ill men in decline, what to do in the aftermath of a political coup, and whether artists can save the dying, horrible world. The injustice toward which the immoral arc of our universe currently bends was charted by several plays addressing the national cancer of racism. To Kill A Mockingbird, adapted by Aaron Sorkin from Harper Lee’s classic Bildungsroman, walk-and-talks us through an essential tale of racist violence in the Depression-era South. (If the plot of this story has not been engraved into your bones since pubescence, you may be part of the problem.) Another white playw

I am a dyed-in-the-ethically-sourced-sustainable-cashmere coastal lefty elitist. I am strenuously inclusionary and empathetic to a fault. I apologize to inanimate objects when I bump into them. I am a socialist Democrat and pacifist to the core. I love everything and everyone and the divine in me honors the divine in you. Truly. Unless you are seated within seeing, hearing, touching, smelling or tasting distance of me in the seating arena of a Legitimate Theatre.  In that case, I do not care what gender, nationality, political party or BDSM role you claim. Whether we are at a show on Broadway or Off Broadway or anywhere else, if you do not adhere to my fascistic standards for audience behavior, we are at war. I have told a woman in a wheelchair to stop talking. I have told a seven-foot-tall man that if he didn’t stop fucking with a plastic bag I would suffocate him with it. I have threatened to shove peanut M&Ms up the ass of a senior citizen who would not stop loudly chomping on them and twisting their wrapper open and shut. I like to think that because I am female, middle-aged, five (5) feet tall and as physically fit as a banana cream pie, these threats are taken in the semi-serious spirit in which they are intended, but there is a real risk that someday I will be challenged to shit or get off 45th Street. So for the sake of everyone’s safety and my criminal record, let’s establish some ground rules. Sit the fuck down. Arrive early, let the ushers show you to your seat,