s there anything more American than a town council meeting? It’s apple pie, baseball, and sales tax all tied up in a starred-and-striped bow of civic virtue. The particular meeting that unfurls, in real time, in The Minutes, flows from the brutal imagination of the playwright Tracy Letts. So no prizes for guessing that this session will include business more vicious than debates over plans for the annual harvest festival.
For long stretches, The Minutes, is dull, which Letts seems to intend as a feature, not a bug. Because wheels of democracy – as anyone who has stuck with C-Span for more than a few minutes can attest – tend to roll slowly, when they don’t get stuck in the mud. On the hyperlocal level, it involves a lot of speechifying, box-ticking, procedure for procedure’s sake. There are jokes, sure, though few of them seem especially effortful.
Yet even in the bland first half, hints of something darker persist. A thunderstorm rages outside. The high school football team? They’re called the Savages. And this session is a closed one. Why? What happened at the last council meeting will of course be revealed later on. But even this revelation is largely beside the point.
That’s because Letts positions The Minutes as allegory – shades of The Crucible or The Lottery or Enemy of the People. His earlier play, August Osage County, explored American life through the microcosm of one dysfunctional family, The Minutes goes macro, exploring America’s foundational myths via one pretty functional local government. The American experiment, Letts suggests, is a devil’s bargain, which the final moments nudge toward the literal.
The arguments that Letts rehearses here might have felt fresher had the play opened in 2020 as planned. But the desire to turn over Plymouth Rock, exposing Manifest Destiny as justification for genocide, and the equally fierce desire to cling to these myths – seen in the bad faith attacks on critical race theory, the frantic attempts at book banning – have since become everyday news.
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