This aggression will not stand.

In her review of Charles Mee's Hotel Cassiopeia, Times theater critic Caryn James goes out of her way to savage the revival of Mee's Ipigenia 2.0, which "we" found riveting. (As did David Cote, Adam Feldman, Feingold and others.)

The ambitious “Hotel Cassiopeia” is a far better representation of what Mr. Mee can do than the muddled “Iphigenia 2.0”... If you’re going to update a Greek play, you’d better have something more substantial to say than “the Greeks had wars too.” While “Hotel Cassiopeia” suffers from a similar hollowness, it has glittering surface charms.

"Muddled"? For me, the exuberant staging brought a vivid clarity to our bewildering modern America, where soldiers rock out to 50 Cent while firing ordnance, where celebrity-worship commingles with sickening carnage on the same "news" website , where the borders between reality and entertainment, fucking and killing, news and pabulum are blurred beyond recognition.

And far from "updating", what Mee has done with Iphigenia is sweep away any antiquation to remind us how timeless the Greek classics really are. This is what any production of a Greek play worth its salt does, but Mee executes it with such unbridled imagination.

And this: "... you’d better have something more substantial to say than 'the Greeks had wars too'"? Really? It's not just the smug tone that's noteworthy, it's that she seems to have watched the show with eyes wide shut. I can think of five substantial concepts off the top of my head which leaped right out at me with gleaming teeth when I saw it. (Read on.)

1.0 While modern media has developed new ways to make the reality of war immediate, man's age-old methods for hiding his head in the sand are just as evolved.

2.0 It would be very interesting indeed if the elite who send us to war were required to make the blood sacrifice imposed on the cannon fodder.

3.0 Despite America's breathtaking decadence, there are still heroes hidden among the sheep.

4.0 Despite all warnings, we will party, party, party all the way to Hell.

5.0 "There is a group determined to continue". Like Cheney's "devotion" to Operation End of Irany, Agamemnon, ostensibly the man in charge, is helpless to stop the dead-enders in his midst.

Coming on top of Jason Zinoman's equally disdainful take on Iphigenia 2.0, I'm left truly baffled by The Central Arbiter's wide-of-the-mark stance here. Gothamist is a comparatively small organ, but in my little world, I was glad to shower more praise on the work in my "Year at Gothamist" round-up.