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DOWN THE ROAD
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by
BRIAN MORTON
MAY.14-20,2009 |
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Serial killers seem to be in vogue locally this season. Only last month, Piccadilly Circus’ production of Bryony Lavery’s Frozen explored the exact same dark territory although reaching very different conclusions.
Black Box Fire Theatre continues their staging of the works of American playwright Lee Blessing, most famous for his 1986 Pulitzer Prize–nominated Broadway produced play A Walk In The Woods. Indeed, the company is doing still another Blessing script Eleemosynary next month as part of the Emerging Artists Series.
This time the play is Down The Road, a lesser–known work concerning a married couple that has traveled to a small town in the Midwest to conduct a series of prison interviews with a serial killer named Bill Reach (A.J. Haygarth) who has confessed to the rape and murder of 19 young women. Alternating between a claustrophobic motel room with a view of the interstate highway, and the interview room of the prison, director Matt Moore does a fine staging of this taut but flawed three–hander that asks pointed questions about the nature of the public’s fascination with mass murderers.
As Bill and Iris Henniman, two journalists who find themselves drawn into the dark psyche of the killer, Jared Lenover and Alexandra Holbrook give professional, balanced and committed performances. Unfortunately, these two characters are not very well drawn in Blessing’s script; and so it is to their credit as actors that the two of them manage to wring so much interest out of such wooden dialogue and situations. The moral dilemma of whether they should be providing such a public platform for a fiend like Bill Reach is discussed but seems insignificant in comparison to their seemingly endless domestic disputes.
It is only in the detailed character study of the serial killer that the play comes to life, and most of this is due to the passionate and subtly nuanced, physical performance provided by A.J. Haygarth. As we know from films like Silence Of The Lambs, it takes a smart actor to convincingly portray a real monster, and Haygarth certainly rises to the challenge here.
What the script really lacks is any discussion or thought around the victims of these crimes. There is an endless litany of names and tragic events in this play. After a while the details of rape, torture and the mutilation of bodies seem repetitive and become pointless. Blessing’s script gives this mayhem no context, since the victims are not drawn well enough for us to care about them. There are just too many undeveloped threads in the play, such as a water heater that does not contain the body of Reach’s 20th victim, or Iris’ second act pregnancy and her unfulfilled desire for a daughter. The conclusion that serial killers are not very nice people, and are likely to lie and embellish their accounts in order to maximize their fame and notoriety was so obvious that one wondered at the need to spend almost two hours belaboring the point. In the end, Down The Road seems like a thinly veiled knock off of Truman Capote’s much more profound In Cold Blood, but without the execution of the killer to give it a real ending.
As the leading company of the new new generation of local theatre artists, Black Box Fire needs to find better plays to demonstrate their obvious talents and abilities. They have proven themselves as regular and capable producers over the past three years, but I still await a production of a play that only they were capable of staging, rather then the ordinary middle of the road fare that could be done by any of the already established community groups in town. It is time for them to find a distinctive voice of their own.
So is this production of Down The Road worth your time? Yes, it is. Even given its obvious flaws, the play is a commercial vehicle that has drama and some humour too. But in the end, I think that these committed and well–acted performances are wasted upon such weak material. V [BRIAN MORTON]
DOWN THE ROAD
Black Box Fire Theatre
@ HTI Studio
Till May 16
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