As a result of our correspondence over the "Rachel Corrie" affair I actually got to know Christopher Shinn as a person before as a playwright. I regretted not having the chance to see his first major works "Four" and "Where Do We Live." So I'm grateful to Chris' help in prodding Lincoln Center Theatre to arrange a "bloggers' night" for his latest, "Dying City," so that I and others in the blogosphere could see his work. And, of course, comment upon it.
Each of the bloggers (so far:
Mark, the ringleader,
George,
James,
Jaime,
Rocco,
Matt,
Lucas, and
Adam) may have their own similar "full disclaimer" disclosures. I myself would just like to say I am not treating this as a "review" but as reflections upon an interesting play I've just seen that happens to be written by a friend. Given that, I feel like approaching this as an analysis more than an evaluation.
To me the most outstanding quality of "Dying City" is how unsettling it is, emotionally. Anthony Ward's ingenious creepily rotating set (so ballyhooed in Ben Brantley's lede) only externalizes the deceptions and instabilities going on inside the characters all the time. Say what you want about it, but this is a play that confronts emotional pain nakedly, and head-on. Not with sentimentalizing speeches and solutions, mind you. The fact that the pain on display in each character never gets resolved--or even fully expressed--makes for not a
pleasant 90 minutes of theatre.
So what I can honestly say I admire about Shinn's writing here is how--unlike a lot of new plays on the nonprofit circuit--this is not a script begging to be liked, in the sense of "enjoyed." The dialogue is not littered with
bon mots to lighten its load, it doesn't invite undue spectacle or cheesy "magical" moments accompanied by lame pop-synth background music. It is an incredibly
serious play, in all the best senses of that word (rigorous, passionate, consistent).
On the other hand, neither would anyone call it "preachy," I think. I mean, what "message" is there? Yes, he wanted to
address the war and our post 9/11 culture, but his subject is the effect of all that on particular lives. He does not attempt to ventriloquize George Bush, or build the whole play around feelgood speechifying. The plot of "Dying City" is clearly
not just a flimsy string to hang sermons on.
And the plot, or the dramatic situations of the play--as enacted by two magnetic actors emodying three intriguing characters--is why people will go, I think. I'm not normally a fan of "jumbled-chronology" plays. But Shinn's focus here is so dramtically disciplined: just back and forth between 2 pivotal nights in the characters' lives. One is the night before Kelly's husband Craig ships out to a military base en route to Iraq. The other (where the play starts from) is a year later, in the same apartment, when Kelly receives a surprise visit from Craig's twin brother Peter, who also was present the earlier night. The two parallel stories manage to intensify effectively without really much "happening" because what's changing is what we learn about the characters. Sturcturally it's an impressive feat.
Ok, so what's it all about? The play is set in NYC, and Kelly is a youngish therapist. Some may say it's unlikely in our experience that such a woman would find herself married to a military guy. (Ok,
I found myself saying that to myself.) But who knows? I also questioned how many soldiers in Iraq are ex-Harvard literary scholars, just trapped by their ROTC obligations....Then again, all I'm saying is: I don't know anyone like that. It's become proverbial that one of the major factors that allows this war to go on is that--unlike in Vietnam--those living in or close to the seats of power and wealth
don't know anyone in this draft-free war. Shinn does lay the groundwork in Craig's middle-American working class background (along with scholarships and a education-dreaming mom) to fill out the scenario. And I'm sure there
are men like him out there. Just because they're not the majority doesn't mean their story can't be told.
And is this a way of bringing the war home--"home" to Lincoln Center theatregoers, that is. Or at least to bring home the war's issues to a recognizable NYC way of life. (More on this later...)
As I said, though, the play does not intend to address Iraq directly but only obliquely--by way of its affects on lives on this side. And in the 3 lives we see on stage, it has, one way or another, fucked them up completely. Peter, the brother, a gay actor, had been enjoying his freedom in New York and Hollywood after escaping the confines of home. But the loss of his other half, Craig, has clearly blown a hole in his world. The whole "present" section of the play depicts his desperate, awkward, and downright unhealthy attempts to find in the resistant Kelly the love and bonding he needs--even if it means exposing her to the worst secrets of Craig's (and his own) past. (He even proposes having a child with her.) Kelly, so obviously still scarred from her loss, spend most of the present "coping" through her hurt, trying to put on a good face for Peter, but clearly underneath cutting off and rejecting him. Indeed rejecting, secretly, her whole past, which is what her whole conflict turns out to be about. In her last moments with Craig the year before, we see a much more vulnerable person and one losing control of a relationship that clearly had been her anchor.
I'm sensing divided opinion on Rachel Brooksher's performance as Kelly. There's Brantley who was blown away, but some of the bloggers and other critics found her cold. I can see the "cold" complaint, but it was clear for me from the outset this was a very calculated characterization. And she was certainly
credible as a young over-responsible idealistic therapist who has to protect herself a bit for being a woman in such a risky profession. (The moment when, in the middle of her life falling apart, she has to call a patient to cancel his appointment is actually almost hilarious in how true and revealing it is.) By the end, though, I was totally sold on Brooksher. She pulls off an amazing unwinding as the character spirals into trauma--twice. (The two plotlines both rip her apart.) And the ending would not be nearly so affecting if she had not put up such a strong facade at the top.
As for Craig himself, he is embodied with striking severity by Pablo Schreiber, all the more strking since Shreiber also plays the more easygoing and affable Peter. Switching back and forth between these polar twins in alternating scenes is surely an actor's feat. But Schreiber and director James Macdonald are careful never to make it seem just a stunt. Shcreiber transformation is so total you're hardly concious of effort involved. And the fluid staging keeps forcing you to see one right after the other with nary a break. Shreiber's mutiple entrances and exits become eerie, not just because one of his roles is effectively a ghost, but because both characters, in scene after scene, are revealed to be not quite who you (or Kelly) thought they were....Schreiber as Peter, as I said, starts as a friendly presence to the audience. But when he's exposed as a serial liar, a keeper of secrets, and not necessarily out to do Kelly good, his presence becomes as menacing as the troubled Craig's.
I dwell on the acting so much since they're a major reason to see the show. Schreiber (who I had mixed feelings about in
Awake and Sing) is giving a career-making performance. And
not just because of the stunt. He is able to embody without words all that Shinn leaves out in these twisted deceiving/self-deceiving male psyches. In both cases there's something a little scary about him--his pumped up physique, his intense narrow eyes, and heavy brooding bearing. Both actors are classically beautiful, which, hey, doesn't hurt. But they're also incredibly reticent--no doubt the mark of director MacDonald, a Royal Court regular expert in Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill. From what I know, Shinn fought to retain MacDonald for any NY production, since he directed the London premiere. I can see why. I've rarely seen an American play acted by American actors with such quiet inensity, and where so much was going on between the lines while yet so little was showing on the actor's faces.
This creepy aura is complemented by Ward's set, which is amazing
not for its relatively low-tech revolve but for its minimalism, for all it
doesn't do. Gutting out the LCT Mitzi Newhouse theatre like I've never seen before, "Dying City" is performed in the round, with one spare couch and television center stage on a small square section of the suggestion of a hardwood floor. One narrow walkway leads to a few kitchen items, two more lead off to exits. That's it. Credit also Pat Collins' lighting for making the world around these essentials vanish in dark, dark, darkness. To get lost in this ominous world for an uninterrupted 90 minutes is in itself riveting theatre.
So, again, what's it all about. "Dying City" may be an anti-war play, but not any typical kind. As written in Schreiber's strained calm demeanor, war is not just a policy, but a male psychosis. And that's to some extend what the play explores. It does so, by the way, very conscious of an American literary tradition exploring brothers vs brothers, fathers and sons. Craig's passions at school were Faulkner and Hemmingway. Peter's reason for being in New York is playing Edmund in a star-studded B'way revival(!) of "Long Day's Journey." The unnamed literary ghost hovering over "Dying City," though, is Arthur Miller, whose domestic warguilt drama "All My Sons" woke up a more victorious postwar audience in 1947, reminding them of the trauma they had all suffered and taken part in. In a recent interview Shinn fessed up to being an Ibsen man, no matter how unfashionable that may sound today. But to his credit, "Dying City" does pick up the mantel of Ibsen and Miller, addressing the polis through personal psychology in a very similar way.
When I said this is not a script that begs to be liked, I meant partly that people may very well not like it who don't like, say, Arthur Miller anyway. It won't be everyone's cup of tea. (And it certainly wasn't for the LCT subscriber ostentatiously coughing and moaning throuout.) I myself tend to like my political theatre more political than personal, even. But I couldn't deny that at the end of "Dying City" I was genuinely affected and disturbed, going places I didn't want to go. Note I don't say "moved" as in a "movie of the week." There's no "triumph over adversity" here.
Maybe one thing that got to me was what I'll just call the Jon Stewart stuff. I had heard about this in advance of the play and was intrigued. But not prepared for how challenging it was in the context of the play to those of us who depend on our irony and distance to deal with what we hate about the world. Basically, Shinn calls out the cynics among us. He himself admits to liking Stewart fine. And it's not a soapbox moment. But just enough to goad us all into thinking--as dramtized in one haunting image--are we helping either ourselves or the world by splaying out on the couch watching hours of Tivo'd "Daily Shows", laughing away while Rome burns? (One of the most revealing moments of the performance was hearing the guilt in the air while some coudln't help laughing at the clips of Stewart's jokes.)
In short, it doesn't address everything about this current mess we're in. But it speaks to the present moment more honestly than any other play I've seen recently. And for that alone it's worth seeing.
For more ticket info and more on Dying City see Lincoln Center Theatre website.
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