One remarkable thing about Giant, which opened this week (a week in which Israel launched a strike on central Beirut), among a number of remarkable things, is that Mark Rosenblatt started writing it in 2018. And yet it feels shockingly prescient, insightful to the point of discomfort. As he was writing the play, Rosenblatt says, he and his wife discussed its themes. “Those kitchen chats have inevitably escalated since October 7th as the anguish and brutality of the situation has grown and grown,” he tells me. “Despair for the loss of life, the cruelty and brutality, shock at the often unmoderated, often medieval prejudice being expressed towards Jews and Palestinians online.”
The subject he says, “tore” at him. Because “with Dahl himself, I was writing from both a critical and affectionate place. Here’s a man I grew up reading, who has helped form my imagination and whom I now love reading to my own kids. And yet, he is also someone who, by his own admission, hates people like me. So writing him, or a version of him, is to constantly juggle those two truths. And that’s often painful.” As was the process of writing about the politics around Israel and Palestine, “writing each characters’ politics with total honesty and rigor, to dig deep and find everything I could to make their position real and heartfelt and true. But, in doing that, you are painfully reminded of how tragically irreconcilable people’s deepest, most visceral truths are.”
As well as a debate about Israel, the drama nimbly considers Jewishness itself, and the “problematic” genius at the table. “For artists, I would expand on the Hippocratic Oath: ‘Do no harm and commit no crimes,’” John Lithgow tells me. “But beyond that, I’ve always been on the side of uncensored art. Artists should be untethered no matter who they are. There is so much great art created by scoundrels and so much bad art created by saints. It’s up to us to like or dislike any work of art without being told what is good or bad for us. And by the way,” he adds, on the fact that Dahl’s publishers recently edited his books to remove language deemed offensive, “they should never have touched Roald Dahl’s prose, about which he was obsessively protective.”
