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Behind Enemy Lines

by christopher grobe | Sep 30, 2007 5:38 pm

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Posted to: Arts

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In Prayer for My Enemy, the new play that currently occupies Stage II at the Long Wharf Theatre, playwright Craig Lucas returns to some of his favorite themes—family strife, addiction, stifled rage, and repressed sexuality.  One assumes that the ideal spectator will exclaim, as one of his characters does in an eruption of interior monologue, “I am in love with your family’s suffering!”

Austin Noone is an alcoholic obsessive.  His daughter, Marianne, is the divorced parent of an autistic child whom she has abandoned to professional care.  His son, Billy, is on leave between tours in Iraq.  His wife, Karen, struggles to maintain the family’s equilibrium.  And Tad Voelkl, the young man in love with their suffering, is also in love with the recently divorced daughter—despite his secret history of adolescent experimentation with her brother.

Lucas reveals the texture of their interrelations through a handful of domestic scenes punctuated with the stylized eruption of interior monologue.  At times, the thoughts expressed stand in humorous or poignant contrast to the scene being played, revealing the unbridgeable distances within this ostensibly intimate group.

More often, though, the profusion of asides disrupts the rhythm of the play and reduces its impact.  Alienating psychobabble and neatly packaged analysis crowd the audience out of any sort of active, interpretive engagement with the play.  I, for one, was left wishing that Lucas would trust the power of his subtle dialogue, the nuance of his actors, and the imaginative capacity of his audience.

Fortunately, there is more to Lucas’s play than this over-determined family drama.  A secondary plot, which seems at first to have only a loose, thematic relation to the family plot, introduces us to Dolores Endler, a woman who has escaped from the impersonal hustle of Manhattan to take care of her dying mother.  In a series of monologues addressed to the audience, Dolores gradually unveils her growing sense of isolation and despair.

Dolores’s monologues, unlike the often-stilted soliloquies of the primary plot, are richly layered with irony and ambiguity.  They reward our emotional and intellectual investment by revealing her character not through blunt exposition and auto-analysis, but through an accumulation of revealing anecdotes and unintended implications.

Julie Boyd is endlessly interesting in the role of Dolores, whom she plays with mesmerizing volatility.  She alternates between the wide-eyed smile and singsong cadence of a kindergarten teacher and the sarcastic rage of a punk rocker.  In her pitch-perfect tirade against the arbitrary power of a traffic cop, we can see both the displaced rage of a grieving daughter and the mad-as-hell mindset that so many Americans feel in the face of a hostile world and an endless war.  In short, she is excellent from start to finish.

In fact, director Bartlett Sher elicits solid performances from the entire cast, although they all show understandable strain when trying earnestly to deliver some of the most blunt and wordy asides.  Cynthia Lauren Tewes is particularly nuanced in her portrayal of a mother who cannot afford the luxury of indulging her own neuroses.  Her wordless reaction to her son’s combat stories will stay with me for weeks.

Although the play’s two plots collide in the end, they are linked more powerfully by a shared emotional tenor. Billy insists, after a near-death experience in Iraq, on the all-importance of human choice, but each character in this play is driven and obstructed by forces that seem hopelessly beyond their control.  Isolation and despair plague them all.

While this is a sensitive portrait of America’s current gestalt, it stagnates as drama.  Ultimately, Mr. Lucas’s characters seem to take a perverse comfort in the sublimity of their own powerlessness—a problem which is only deepened by the self-effacing solution that the play offers (see the title).  The result is an aestheticization of suffering that does more to perpetuate than to purge the pain.

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