Although Rabe writes brilliantly, he needs virtuoso actors to do him well. He has them here in Laurence Gleason (Tomtom, who is dumb), and Joe Pacheco (Goose, who's dumber). Both actors were extraordinary in releasing frantic energy and playing affection and violence off each other.
The excellent acting (except for one small but crucial role at the end played by one of three last minute arrivals: Ken Forman, Joseph Adams, and Bjarni Thorsson) included the powerful Tasha Lawrence playing a moll. This young Diane Weist was everything Madonna could have hoped to be when she played the role in 1986. And John Billeci fit his part perfectly as the tortured villain.
Angela Nevard, who played a fantasy character, tugged the low-life Goose and Tomtom specters inside out into angelic beatitude that, like much of the play, made no earthly sense.
But we're in mythic territory here, where the director had his hands full making sense of purposefully inhuman reactions. The play bested him when it assigned illogical tasks (like writing careless graffiti all over the walls) that unfocused the audience's concentration, so that, by Act II, the violence became a Punch and Judy show repeatedly trading rubber dudgeon blows. Despite fine acting we recognized that balsa break-aways don't really hurt.
Miguel Lopez-Castillo did his best designing an intimate set to accommodate some huge ideas, like a crucifixion scene, or smashing a hole in walls that divide, revealing a star-spangled Hell.
One of the characters dreams that "ghosts come in with evil in their hearts, and they glow like the moon." Surreal lighting by Matthew McCarthy created that moonscape, plus a realistic sunrise and ghostly shadows. Tasha Lawrence selected appropriate costumes for hooded demons and everyone else.
Rabe's difficulty was to elevate a mish-mash of scurvy characters into poetry that pokes its "fingers...at the stars." Such a task may be like playing Chopin in the midst of slaughtered animals.
Reaching down to assault the visceral emotions (through such devices as realistically sticking pins in people's arms), the weirdness of the play's logic eventually discouraged the audience from caring where the play was going. That technique was its fatal flaw.
And so the author's moral conclusion about demons and ghosts beneath the surface of our nation's character, which seemed to be his central theme, finally lay airless like the black-lighted moonscape glowing on-stage.
There may be terrible evil in America which the author addresses. But this play's voice is muffled by its artifice.
Copyright 1999 Marshall Yaeger