2007: The Moments in Review

Viewers often take issue with reviews based on artistic differences. My issues with Brandon Thorp's vituperative, personal attack on the artistic director and playwright of the award-winning play, Defining Code Red, has more to do with intellectual integrity and taste. Months after Thorp hailed the play, "Best New Drama (2007)," he writes a nasty, sophomoric little piece that takes cheap potshots at playwright, Justin Koren, based on nothing more than a "slimy feeling" which appears to have come over Thorp like a hot flash, or sour grapes. How does your publication reconcile Thorp's careless, catty, comments with your original glowing review of what you called "the gutsiest play" with "scenes that [the viewer] will remember months later, more clearly and more powerfully than the intervening months themselves"?

First, Thorp complains that the media event surrounding the play "outstripped the tragedy" which was the root and inspiration for Koren's script. How is that a legitimate criticism? Art has the power to breathe new life into tragedies, enabling real events to transcend the trash pile of yesterday's news; that is exactly what Koren achieved in this theatrical masterpiece which has touched the core of thousands of viewers. If Thorp's seemingly hyperbolic comment is correct, and the play has indeed captured more attention than news coverage of the tragedy itself, isn’t that a testament to Koren’s art and the success of his oeuvre?

Then, there is Thorp’s odd, unfounded pronouncement that Koren's motivation was narcissism. The play is not in any way the showcase of a self-absorbed narcissist. The work, which is not at all about Koren, speaks for itself. Its subject was a news story which would have long been forgotten, but for scenes from Defining Code Red which are forever seared into the social psyche of its viewers. The tragedy of the Southwood Middle School murder still haunts me, courtesy of indelible scenes delivered by Koren and his amazing cast.

Finally, Thorp makes a mockery of the word "evidence" by pretending that there is any that bolsters the claim in his rhetorical indictment which asks the reader to consider "how few questions were asked by the play" and "how little" was "learned from it." Somebody please flip a light switch for Thorp! The play was never meant to be didactic; it is a theatrical production which seeks to entertain and provoke, not a lesson or a sermon!

In its multi-level personalization of the ripple effects of a disturbing, senseless murder, Koren's play reaches a broad range of viewers in ways press coverage could never achieve. The play evoked deep responses from the audience and engendered much necessary discussion in the community. There is only one word in Thorp's piece which is right on the money; that is the word "genius." Defining Code Red was a work of genius beautifully, touchingly revealed in Koren's dynamic script and powerfully delivered by an exceptionally talented, formidable cast.

Thorp’s nail-scratching “about-face” on this is a betrayal to readers that speaks volumes more about Thorp than it does about Koren or his play, and what it says is not good. How Thorp will ever redeem his credibility after this is beyond me.

/s/ Maria Shohat

To view the original article visit this New Times Web site: http://bestof.miaminewtimes.com/bestof/award.php?award=483547

Best New Drama (2007)
Defining Code Red, by Justin Koren
The Riviera Theatre
1560 S. Dixie Highway
Coral Gables, FL 33146

Defining Code Red was the gutsiest play performed in South Florida this year, a drama that didn't so much penetrate the fourth wall as exist outside of it from the beginning, intersecting with its audience in dangerous and unpredictable ways. On the morning of February 3, 2004, seventh-grader Jaime Rodrigo Gough was stabbed to death in a bathroom at Southwood Middle School in Palmetto Bay. Justin Koren, a Southwood alum who was, at that time, building a theater career in New England and the U.K., got the news via e-mail and was instantly galvanized. Three years later, he had interviewed virtually everybody who had something to do with the event and who was willing to talk about it. Koren then distilled these debriefings into the haunting, unclassifiable Defining Code Red. It's not a finished work, one hopes — there are scenes that could do with some editing, and some that might benefit from getting scrapped altogether — but there are also scenes that you'll remember months later, more clearly and more powerfully than the intervening months themselves. When the action leaps from police station interrogations to the discovery of the boy in the bathroom; as it speeds up past the point of comprehension, the memories too adrenaline-drenched to properly order; as the names of all the country's dead kids are memorialized in a grisly faux-graduation — breaths catch, hearts break, and you are ashamed at your own ability to stay calmly seated. These are scenes so visceral and nakedly passionate that they could only have been drawn from life itself, and a standing ovation seems like a woefully inadequate response.