The Press Nights Post No One Will Ever See

IN WHICH I MAKE AN EDITORIAL DECISION TO TALK DIRTY

 WHICH ACTOR USED  THE F WORD?  Gregg Mozgala as a wealthy man in a wheelchair and Martyna Majok as his new employee in  this summer's Manhattan Theater Club production of "Cost of Living." 

YES. I KNOW. THE NEWLY redesigned version of pressnights.com was supposed to be here by now. All I can tell you is that it’s coming. As we await its arrival, we’ll continue to post here – and we’ll start the fall with the announcement a major policy decision: Press Nights will print the F word.

For 26 years, I had to avoid that most vivid and versatile vulgarity because I worked for The New York Times. I had to come up with inventive ways to avoid it.

At times, I’d want to stop interview subjects and ask if they could please repeat what they’d just said but without the adjective “fucking” or the verb “fuck,” because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to use their quote. (Same problem if they’d said “What an asshole!”)

At times, I’d cleverly (?) work around it – e.g. “I am so angry,” the beautiful movie star said, adding a colorful vulgarity as an adjective.  “He is going to get very messed up,” the beautiful film director said, using a common vulgarity rather than “messed.” (Yes, The Times does occasionally use the word and other vulgarities, but the guideline has always been that the use of the word itself is newsworthy (because of who said it and/or whom/what they said it about), as in one late 2017 use of “The man is a fucking moron.”)

In late August, I prepared a post for pressnights.com about some of the most entertaining, puzzling or infuriating theater things I’d seen over the summer. I chose five items (“Cost of Living,” Bette Midler’s Tonys speech, protests over “Julius Caesar” in the Park, absence of nausea during the torture scene in “1984” and the finale of “Me the People”), and two of the five were indescribable without, yes, the F word.

The post (which will now never see the light of day, because this reporter is a lazy slug) gave “Cost of Living,” at City Center, an award for “best line of equal obscenity and political incorrectness.” It was from a scene in which a wealthy young man in a wheelchair is interviewing a deserving young woman for a job as his home health care aide. In conversation, she uses the euphemism "differently abled."  He replies: "Don't say ‘differently abled.’ That's fucking retarded."

Later in the post, Press Nights named the summer’s “greatest act of catharsis by a low-budget Off Broadway musical.” It was from “Me the People: The Trump America Musical,” playing at the cozy upstairs Triad Theater on the Upper West Side. In the show’s finale, a Hillary Clinton type leads a political rendition of Cee Lo Green’s 2010 hit “Fuck You” (sometimes referred to as “Forget You”). Nobody needs to suggest that audience members join in; they just do.

So, with apologies to sensitive ears and all that is holy, Press Nights announces that it will abide by most New York Times style rules, but not the one about vulgarities and profanity. And we probably won’t use honorifics.  But we may spell tranquility with two L’s.