In the current Broadway production of the King and I, the King of Siam, once played with electric virility by Yul Brynner, comes off as curiously sexless. Overt animal masculinity seems to have been suppressed, perhaps as being retrograde, or even offensive to the spirit of the age. That musky beast belongs offstage, or in the Museum of Natural History.
It is the same in the theater of politics. If we accidentally glimpse animal masculinity there--the Tasmanian devil of male desire--it is like stumbling upon secret squalor, the hand under the table, the old Packwood charm. A public exposure of the...
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