What I liked
Great writing and acting. Ben as Lee was utterly believable and captivating.
What I didn't like
It felt like Lee was the hero here and there wasn’t a substantive counterweight to his mania. The Southern Strategy which was the crux of his entire political career was not discussed, and the one scene where it comes into play doesn’t make it a big enough case for how awful he and the strategy truly is. There are no consequences for the dog whistling. And it seemed like such an afterthought throughout the play when it was the bread and butter of his strategy. To quote him and to remind everyone of what that is, that folks in the audience seemed to forget or not even know:
“Atwater: Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger”. By 1968 you can’t say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this”, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger”. So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the backbone."
I understand Gillespie’s point about getting wrapped up in political diatribe – but I know the man and refused to hoot and holler with everyone else. There needed someone on stage to be a strong antagonist to Lee.
My overall impression
Smartly written political drama that unfortunately fails to give adequate weight to Atwater’s biggest inequities – his dog-whistle racism and Southern Strategy.
