peteg's blog - noise - theatre - 2014 07 13 TheLateHenryMoss

The Artistic Home: The Late Henry Moss.

/noise/theatre | Link

Thinking it was about time I tried out the theatre scene here, I found a promising review of this piece in the Chicago Reader. The theatre is in fact around the corner from where I reside, so while I'm not living in the red light district of my imaginings, it did serve as a decent simulation of the Griffin Theatre. Unfortunately they are nowhere as prolific.

The piece itself was Sam Shepard's new thing, and this was supposed to be its mid-western premiere (the season, not this particular episode). Well, what can I say. The acting was OK when it wasn't histrionic, but the play is crap. It made me think of Erskineville Kings for the most part, and more obscurely the Pixies's Hang Wire. I guess you could say it failed to grip me. These exhausted Mexicans-as-shamans concepts now stifle America's imagination and myth-making; I saw it in Born on the Forth of July, and that at least used Vietnam as a source of damage and not World War II. Perhaps admitting as much, this production yielded up some cheap titillation from the singular actress getting her kit off. Sons and fathers, domestic violence, and sundry eternal tropes; I spaced out a lot so I missed plenty. I didn't follow the flashbacks closely, and lost track of the epistemics. The rhythm of calm, hysterics, violence, calm (etc) was poorly pitched. Julian Hester, the taxi driver from Albuquerque, put me in mind of two things: the old Bugs Bunny cartoons where he doesn't take the right turn there, and Brad Pitt from 12 Monkeys. Frank Nall does his best as the dead father.

I got my tickets from Goldstar: half price + $4.50 or so, for a total of less than $20. This event was general admission so seat quality didn't matter. I feel a bit bad playing that game, and I guess the karmic retribution is that I paid the play less mind than if I'd paid it full-fare.