White House advisor Steve Bannon’s play about the 1992 Los Angeles riots has been chum for the internet for at least a year, but now the full text has been unearthed.
NowThis was given a copy of the script for The Thing I Am by co-writer Julia Jones, and organized a 20-minute table read of the play, which strives to link Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus and the Los Angeles riots. You must endure absence of plot, stilted use of slang and Shakespearean verse, and the N-word.
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The play never got past a script, for reasons that should be apparent, but Bannon and Jones did do a special reading in 2006. The Daily Beast obtained a copy of an invitation, which reportedly claimed “Shakespeare was a natural rapper.” Earlier this year Jones appeared on CNN to speak about Bannon, but abruptly left the interview.
As the AV Club writes about the play:
It’s total nonsense, with characters named Baby Gangsta and Stink Eye and one character described in the script with this flourish: “Abandon hope all ye who fuck with her.”
The Boondocks’ Gary Anthony Williams, one of the table readers, told the Washington Post: “I think Steve Bannon thought he had figured out black people, much in the way of Trump: ‘Carnage! Chicago is carnage! … American carnage! That I have the answer. That if you could listen to me, this can fix that.’”
H/T AV Club
