I wrote this some months ago, but haven’t considered posting it until now. So references to how recent it is, well… grain of salt. I haven’t been to a play in a month.
This past Friday I …well… I sat in a theater for two hours and stared, slackjawed at what purported to be theater.
The play opens in a US military hospital in Germany. The caricature of a goombah Iraq vet is mourning over a coffin with a couple pictures and lit candle set on the top. The coffin contains his squad leader who didn’t quite make it. There’s talk of the both of them having been heros. The two of them are to leave on a plane in the morning for home, one with the wounded, one in cargo.
Amidst a few minutes of conversational backstory and some urging, the coffin lid slides open and the squad leader, Voychevski, badly mutilated, emerges asking what he’s doing in that box. So there’s a run of jokes about military mistakes and the amount of paperwork this is going to cause when they decide to fill the coffin with dead weight and make their own way back home.
The next scene is presumably a back room of a nightclub where a “fashionably dressed” smarmy Army Captain is closing on a deal to sell weapons to generic deadpan muslim #442 from central casting. There was a cute note about how “when we leave, this will enable the filth to just keep killing each other, doing our work for us.”
The soldiers come in and after some hubub about wanting to put Voych in a reality show because of his condition, the scene changes. Voych is then wearing the captain’s bright red shoes.
We are taken through a few vignettes as the pair of them make their way around the US.
The soldier whose name I’ve blissfully forgotten hires a couple blind hookers for the two of them. After that goes awry the two soldiers have a moment where they drop a couple plot points. Voych hears voices giving him orders he can’t quite make out; and he doesn’t feel anything. At first it sounds like a shell-shock metaphor but it turns out quite literal. Then we find out he hasn’t eaten, or slept… in a month. The other soldier is normal.
I kept looking down the row where I was sitting to see if I could possibly have gotten out, but I was smack dab in the middle of the row.
They continue traveling aimlessly and plotlessly, eventually meeting Voych’s wife who has the proverbial “baby born while soldier is abroad.” There’s a fair amount of whining about the government not caring about the little people and we’re introduced to the wife’s new abusive live-in boyfriend. After a scuffle Voych is stabbed in the chest, but there’s no blood. He breaks the boyfriend’s neck and they move on.
Yeah. It’s a zombie play.
Cut to the two of them in the woods someplace, sleeping on the ground. A shabbily dressed “good ol’ boy” comes in, thick with accent, beard, and evangelical talk of The Lord to tell them they should get some sleep because they’re rolling out in the morning to Texas.
In the background is Mt. Rushmore.
The truck driver had said they were going to Alaska, but it turns out they’re proceeding to Texas because “Nobody goes to Alaska on purpose!”(thunderous laughter.) He describes The Voice that told him to pick up these two wayward souls that they might be sayv-duh. I’m not sure how they could have made him more comical without putting a red rubber nose on him. Every mention of God or the Voice elicited the desired snickers from the crowd.
The truck driver leaves the set and Voych argues about going to Texas. Then the heads of Mt. Rushmore open and in a deep voice say “TEXAS” and he argues some more. After a while, they (the heads) start murmuring and Voych looks to them, nodding, seeming to suddenly understand. The spot tightens and brightens on him as he has his epiphany, bounding up and down yelling “I understand.”
I leaned over to my companion and whispered “The BAND!”
Newly energized the scene changes, to…
Crawford, Texas.
Inside the President’s ranch house.
The two soldiers cut the phone lines, kill the guards and the staff (they explain later) in order to get their audience with Bush to tell them how to stop the war.
Amidst 20 minutes of “George Bush as Pinata” jokes that make whoopi goldberg seem like an intellectual, the plan comes out and that is to put Voychevski’s face on Mt. Rushmore. That way, when they see the ugly face of heroes, people will…. err… somehow stop the war. They were never quite clear on step 2.
More back and forth and Voych slaps his head in a sudden V8 moment, begs forgiveness for his presumption and realizes that the voices didn’t want HIS face on Mt. Rushmore, but Bush’s face, looking like his.
So, in order to get the President’s face to look like his, they explain that they need to duct-tape him to a chair, cover him with gasoline and set him on fire, then rescue him after he’s been mutilated a bit.
This plan goes off without a hitch, with the actor playing George Bush grinning irrepressibly from behind his character. (Turns out G.W.Bush was played by none other than the playwright.)
The lighting special effects of the burning room die down with the lights for a moment.
The lights raised on a new picture of Mt. Rushmore; one with the addition of George Bush’s mutilated face.
It was two hours of “let’s put Bush’s head on a pike.” It was poor theater, far from art, and a plotless mess. It wasn’t a reasoned critique of anything. Utter and complete garbage. But the impressively pathetic audience ate it up.
This, my friends, is what passes for theater nowadays. I couldn’t clap even to be polite and as we stood up I described, almost loud enough for my taste, my reaction to such unforgivable fucking tripe (calling it, among other things “unforgivable fucking tripe”) to the assembled thralls of liberalism. (Some of whom had the gall to be offended without any sense of irony whatsoever.)
On the subway return trip, we ran into another couple who was there and proceeded to have a discussion about the play. I was, with all my will brought to bear, able to not actually spit. But the discussion was about how complex and challenging the themes were and how she (of the other couple) was going to go away and think about this for a long long time.
There were the standard money quotes of “Well, but I support the troops of course.” (sure, you just don’t support their decisions) and complaints as to how we change the channel when they show the coffins, as though soldiers who had paid the ultimate price were to be some kind of public-square spectacle for the contemplation of the masses.
In my shock (and awe, heh ) I muttered about how there are solid meaningful complaints and issues with the war in Iraq and our President and the play took no opportunity to take substantive issue and instead took the easy route to some giggles from the lefty New York theater crowd.
Surprisingly I did get a mild concession on that one.
Then there was the winning crack about how these things are challenging and SOME people (actually looking at me, raising her eyebrows) when challenge is dropped at their feet, don’t… you know (take up the mantle.)
Sweety, if this is what the New York Illiterati considers “challenging” then I think you should buy some legos and prepare to have your mind blown.
The next night however, I saw some theater. Sure, the acting was a little weak, but it was good. It rubbed me the wrong way, but in the “ooh, that’s REALLY uncomfortable” way. It rubbed me the wrong way because it was effective, interesting and engaging. I believed the characters were who they were. THAT play was called “Three Changes.” It’s about an upper east side Manhattan stale marriage and the artistic older brother to the husband who shows up after years of silence.
He proceeds to take over the household entirely, brings his juvenile gay lover in to live with them, and strong-arms the husband into acquiescence. It’s a disturbing and effective thing. The staccato acting on most parts was pretty easy to overlook. The minor character of the mistress seemed to be the only one enjoying what she was doing and she delivered her character smoothly and effectively.
Since then (this is now months ago) I have seen some truly exceptional things in the “off-off-off-off Broadway” category. Plays where I had a great thundering head twist that I enjoyed the whole way through.
There are things out there worth seeing, lots of them. But I’m amazed at how low the low has sunk.
