"Wicked," the other play I saw last week, is based on the Gregory Maguire novel by the same name that came out around 8 years ago. It purports to be the true story of the Wicked Witch of the West, and aims to tell what really happened in Oz when Dorothy blew into town. (Of course, the monumentally silly part of all this is that the story of The Wizard of Oz isn't even "true" in the context of the movie -- and it's clearly the movie that's the point of cultural reference here, not the books -- because it's a dream Dorothy has when she gets bopped on the head. Nevertheless.) The show as a theater experience lacked a major ingredient, as far as I'm concerned, because it's a musical and the music is mediocre. But I thought everything else -- performances, dialogue, lyrics; sets, costumes, choreography, direction, and especially the story (a distillation of the book, which I haven't read but is now on my list) was terrific. Partly that's because this show was dealing with the same issues as "I Am My Own Wife": the fact that history is written by whomever's left standing.

At every point where the action in the play touches the original story you can see why -- assuming "Wicked" is true and the movie was lying -- we were told what we were, and you can see how the story as it was handed to us was stitched together out of the fabric of truth after it was snipped and altered. The brilliance of this as an allegorical approach is precisely that it's working off a complete work of fiction, in which it's always been very clear who the good guys and bad guys are and where our sympathies are supposed to lie. It becomes astoundingly clear that a little re-imagining can give you an entirely different set of causes for known results. "Truth is One, Paths are Many?" Sure, but what if the "truth" we're talking about is political reality as we know it and the "paths" we're talking about are history?