GIANT: John Lithgow’s Uneasy Dahl – Review
6 / 10
Still, Giant spends some two hours playing is-he-or-isn’t-he before a mic drop finale that conclusively proves (by dramatizing an actual interview he gave to The New Statesman) that he is. Or, in the most undeservedly graceful reading, that his stubbornness so blinds him to consequence that he’d be willing to sound like he is. It’s a terrific character study. The issue is that Giant also spends those two hours playing cat and mouse with the broader question of whether anti-zionism equals antisemitism; Dahl being the only character to firmly decry the invasion and take issue with Israel’s governance. He dodges the main accusation by bringing up valid concerns over war, displacement and colonialism, which erroneously and irresponsibly intertwines the two thoughts as the play goes on. Closing the play on a confirmation of Dahl’s antisemitism, Rosenblatt bangs the gavel on the conflation: if Dahl was lying about the roots of his anti-zionism, surely so must others be guilty of that masquerade. For all its dramatic pleasures and gestures towards nuance, Giant winds up feeling like the latest example of a type of weaponized censorship that deems any criticism of governments as human-scale hate speech.
