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Cityclumps, Schnapps, & Permanent War
by Regina DeAngelo | Jun 23, 2006 8:55 am
Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author
Posted to: Arts
time: somewhere in the future.
The place: the underground residence of the Underwoods: Max, Sheila and Samantha.
The scenario: a war has been raging on American soil for 15 years. Survivors have moved underground into “cityclumps,” where scotch and gin flow like water but food is becoming scarce. TV is controlled by a supreme leader called The Speaker of the Day; fashions are 1950s-starched crinolines, pumps, suspenders and hats; and everyone is so terrified they can’t wipe the smiles off their faces.
This is the scene of Nastaran Ahmadi’s The War is Over, the first play of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s season. It is a timely firecracker of a play, going off just as our real-life leaders debate whether to exit, stage left, or keep playing out the drama known in the news as “Iraq.” Ahmadi’s bad guys, Max Underwood and his Right Hand Man, represent the direction in which our own leaders are heading as long as America’s TV-drugged majority sticks to its present inertia. “It’s about pacification,” says Max. “In order to win, one must pacify.”
The War is Over hints at what we have in common with those on the stage: too busy with somnambulating at our leisure-time pursuits, we willingly practice political ignorance. The play plays on this phenomenon with the characters’ appetite for mini-golf. “Putting is so comforting,” says Sheila Underwood, over and over, cradling her mini-golf club. Like Sheila and Max, we are so conditioned to having fun, fun, fun that we change our internal channels to avoid the blood seeping into the nightly news, despite Fox-News-like attempts to wash it all off.
Only when the family-room TV seems to go on the fritz do two of the play’s lesser citizens (a wife and a girl who’s just turning 20) get a glimpse what the corporate-controlled media has been editing out: actual footage of the war on “the border.” That is when hell breaks loose, and a moment’s loss of control on the mini-golf green unhinges a turn of events that all the peach schnapps in the cityclump can’t smooth over.
Unchecked, political drama can veer toward the pedantic; Ahmadi’s drama is not immune. Some of the play’s pithier lines are delivered in repetition, their meaning unfolding as the scenes play out, but sometimes the repetition gets repetitive. A couple of the monologues verge on the plangent; a few more of Ahmadi’s nice absurdist touches might have lightened those scenes. At these times it is the pure knockout talent of Yale Summer Cabaret’s actors carrying the play. These actors know what they’re doing, and they are thrilling to watch. Caitlin Clouthier (in above photo) and Nick Carriere are frightening in their perfection of Sheila and Max. Brian Henry (Bradley) is a human cannonball. All of them glow under the whip-smart, snappy direction of May Adrales.
The War is Over is an intellectual, witty, madcap discourse delivered with abundant talent by the Yale’s summer players. Just in time to wake up the clueless American, it deftly paraphrases some of our actual leaders’ hair-raising comments about the supposed necessity of war. “What is that smell?” it asks. If only the real Speaker of the Day and his Right Hand Man had nose enough to know.
The War is Over continues until July 1. Three more plays fill out the Yale’s Summer Cabaret season, which ends Aug. 12 with Eugene Ionesco’s The New Tenant.
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