In the mountain of coverage following Cho Seung-Hui’s deadly rampage on the Va. Tech campus Monday, many commentators have observed that he took a playwriting class at the university last fall. The short plays Cho turned in for the class have been described as disturbing, profane, violent, and — in another bad sign for Cho’s legacy going forward — remarkably bad. In this, the commentators are spot-on. If you want to check out the two short plays for yourself, they’ve been posted on AOL’s news site by one of Cho’s fellow playwriting students, who apparently pulled the copies off an online peer-review bulletin board used by students in the class. Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone cover such topics as rape, evil stepfathers, pedophilia, murder, fake IDs, slot machines, massive bowel movements, and chainsaws as weapons. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Read anything by playwrights like Sam Shephard, Neil Labute, Tracy Letts, and a dozen others — Quentin Tarantino, anyone? — and you’ll find far worse. The chief problem with Cho’s dramatic imagination is that it’s just not very imaginative.
Being a death-dealing psycho killer is not mutually exclusive to being a good writer. Remember Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski? His 35,000-word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, was a rambling but eloquent, intelligent diatribe on the future dangers of technological subjugation. Kaczynski’s argument was so thorough and so compelling that it inspired (if that’s the right word) some of the most respected scientists in the world to seriously consider the points he made. No less a star than Bill Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote a now-famous article in Wired magazine in 2000 entitled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” that draws heavily on themes Kaczynski first established on in his essay. It doesn’t make Kaczynski a better guy, but at least it’s not Richard McBeef. —PS
