THE STORY: Right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh seems unstoppable. His daily audience has risen to six million listeners. But Rush’s manager, the fictional Barry Granatour, has disturbing news: Limbaugh faces a serious ratings battle with radio rival J. Neil Rodriguez, a Latino commentator. Granatour suggests Spanish lessons. Donning pseudonym and disguise, Rush attends language classes at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, New York City. There he encounters, in the flesh, all the people he has enjoyed mocking on the air: feminists, leftists, environmentalists. And there he also meets Nina Eggly, a fellow middle-aged student who awakens Rush’s dormant romantic urges. Mutual passion flares. What Rush doesn’t know is that Nina is really a former Weather Undergrounder, long since chased into hiding by the FBI. There is a Byzantine web of additional plotlines, including a New York Shakespeare Festival production in which Limbaugh is cast as Othello opposite Garrison Keillor’s Iago and Jackie Mason’s Roderigo, all under the direction of Spalding Gray. The play, framed as a public television documentary, is studded with political and social satire and builds to a wildly farcical conclusion.
An hysterical satirization of the outspoken, right-wing talk show host, and the media.
“A dazzling, funny, dead-on-the-mark skewering of a 1990s media-maddened America…The evening glows with the true satirist’s affectionate regard for the very follies he lays bare. Varon is a comedic meteor.” —San Francisco Chronicle.
“A comic tour-de-force.” —The New Yorker.
“A delight…This is a cheerful evening, and a sweet one and a gentle one, and also, fortunately, quite, quite mad.” —Washington Post.
“Varon’s work has a freshness, a playfulness and a theatrical expertise that makes it one of the nicest surprises of the season.” —New York Daily News.
