Mark Rosenblatt's play "Giant" opens with a question that cannot be answered: what do we do with art made by monsters?

The question is not rhetorical. It is the question that Rosenblatt spent years trying to answer in the process of writing a play about Roald Dahl—the beloved author of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "Matilda," and "James and the Giant Peach," who was also, unreservedly, an antisemite.

John Lahr's review in the New Yorker is a model of literary criticism—attentive to the play's formal achievements, honest about its limitations, and unwilling to resolve the question that the play raises. "Giant" does not tell us whether we should read Dahl. It tells us what it costs to read him.

The Monster-Artist Problem

The cultural moment has produced an unusual number of monster-artist problems. Dahl's antisemitism was not a secret, but it was not widely known either—the kind of open secret that everyone aware of but nobody discussed, because discussion would require confronting the implications.

Those implications are now unavoidable. Dahl wrote that "even a tiny little mite of a child" of Jewish appearance has "big black攻克" and "a particular恶意 about theeyes." He wrote this in 1933, when such writing was not unusual. He continued writing this way for decades.

The question the play asks is not whether Dahl was an antisemite—he was—but what it means that his books have given pleasure to millions of children who had no idea what their author believed.

The Play's Answer

"Giant" does not answer the question it raises. This is, arguably, the correct artistic choice. The question does not have an answer that can be articulated in dramatic form—or rather, any answer that could be dramatized would falsify the complexity of the problem.

Rosenblatt's solution is to make the complexity itself the subject. The play is about the act of reading—the way meaning accrues to text through the reader's imagination, and the way that imagination is contaminated by knowledge of the author's character.

Lahr's review describes the play's formal strategy with precision: "The Giant of the title is not the giant of Dahl's fairy tales. It is the giant of the reader's own imagination—the image that forms when a child reads 'James and the Giant Peach' and encounters a world where anything is possible. Rosenblatt's play is about what happens when that image is contaminated by knowledge of its creator."

The Ethical Position

The play has been criticized for failing to take a clear ethical position. This criticism is misdirected. The play's refusal to take a position is itself the position.

The ethical question—what do we do with art made by monsters?—cannot be answered by a play. It can only be lived. And the living involves the kind of ambivalence that the play is honest enough to dramatize.

This is not comfortable art. It is not meant to be. It is meant to be true—to the complexity of the problem, to the impossibility of resolution, and to the fact that the problem will not go away simply because we have decided not to think about it. [1].