"Frank Rich and John Simon are the Syphilis and Gonorrhea of the Theater"

That’s a quote by the great David Mamet, back in the days when he was a “brain-dead liberal” (his words), in the late 1980s.

I gotta believe his view of Simon has softened considerably since then. Simon was no red-hot conservative partisan, not remotely. He was merely a critic who expected beauty and culture from screen and stage in an era when beauty re…