. . . Urs Widmer's Top Dogs . . . Satire . . . overarching political and cultural satire into a "psychopathological" (from the program notes) satire . . . the corporate class elicits our pity and we can't help but be tinged with self righteous satisfaction . . . I'm not them! . . . the structure is many disjointed short scenes resulting in an episodic and scurrilous show . . . comedy, music, and gender play fuse to ridicule . . . to belittle the messy realities of those elite (a miserable elite it is) who desire control . . . precisely acted in a sparse, clinical environment we laugh smugly . . . the writing has bold strokes which allows for collective imagination that the director, actors and audience participate in with joy . . . yet intensity occupies the territory of meanings . . . the mutual making of meanings . . . great satire has the distance, ambiguity and ambivalent facility to be conscious of itself . . . making us more conscious . . .

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