script: Sam Shepard
director: Dr. Gary Diomandes
cast: Casey Howe, Peter Snell, Melissa Kaffine, Andy Greene
scenic designer: Fluffy Blake
lighting designer: Fluffy Blake
costume designer: Br. Thomas Houde, FSC
sound designer: Jimmy Iddins
stage manager: Melanie Reuvers
The U.S. government invades rural Wisconsin.
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This is not one of Shepard's best.
At the beginning of this long one-act, I felt as though I could have been watching a Pinter play -- the clipped language, a husband and wife not really listening to one another but managing to communicate, a stranger, perhaps two, invading their home. It sounds a little like Pinter's The Birthday Party. But this piece goes off on a Shepard rampage against the Bush administration's use of patriotism to throw out the American Constitution and do whatever the hell it pleases.
The play hits you over the head a little too much with its message, which makes it comical. And by being comical, we lose any sense of fear and horror and revulsion at what is being done.
The idea that the stranger in the basement had received so many shocks that he carried electricity within him, was great, and the sense of his being tortured i nthe basement was sickening and compelling. But as soon as he made his appearance onstage and received a shock, it could in no way match the degree to which the actor could play it unseen.
I'm still not sure why the farmer, who begins to convert to the patriotic agent's ways, reacted as he did to the shock treatments. I don't believe that there was enough time for him to have been subjected to the tortures.
Some of the dialog seemed just wrong. The Wisconsin born and bred, farm wife, reacts to the torture by commenting on how the wires are attached to the man's penis. She must say "penis" four or five times. I couldn't imagine her doing that. And then, after having said this much, she then refers to it as, "His ... thing." NOW she can't say "penis?"
The cast did a decent job with a difficult, less than stellar play.
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