Peter Marks, theater critic for the Washington Post, is doing a series “applying a theater critic’s eye to the performative skills of the presidential candidates.”

Yesterday he critiqued Elizabeth Warren:

“Warren bounds onto the stage…. The affect is upbeat, barely contained energy. She just can’t wait to tell you stuff…. It’s almost as if you were attending a one woman Broadway play. She’s as agile as many physical comedians. She uses her hands gracefully driving home points with precise fluid gestures. In her native Oklahoma twang she can speak for 30 minutes or longer without notes or ums or ers. And her presentation, even her humor, tells a story that skillfully integrates her own biography with a political philosophy. A philosophy that she is able to boil down to what sounds like everyday common sense.”

[Editor’s notes: 1. This is the third in a series. I hadn’t checked out the first, on Kamala Harris, or the second, on Joe Biden, but — full disclosure — I’m an Elizabeth Warren fan and I enjoyed the video the Washington Post produced for the series.

2. I’ve linked to Marks’ videos, not his written reviews. (The quote above is my transcription from the Warren video.)

3. I wondered how Donald Trump might respond to reports of Warren as rock star, delivering bravura performances before big crowds. This brought to mind an apparently apocryphal story (it was always hard to take literally, though it has had staying power) about the 1950 Florida Democratic primary campaign for the U.S. Senate. At the time Time magazine reported a “yarn” that George Smathers, who went on to defeat incumbent Senator Cluade Pepper, had told campaign crowds:

Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, he has a brother who is a known homo sapiens, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.

So far, in spite of Warren’s command of the stage, no one has alleged that she is an actual thespian.]

(Image from WaPo video on YouTube.)