BETTER DAYS
Metraform
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Richard Dresser’s Better Days describes an end of the world that will be familiar to anyone who remembers the pessimistic predictions of eight to ten years ago: what postindustrial America will look like after all the factories have closed and all the permanently laid-off, ever downwardly mobile members of the no-longer-working class have lost faith in the system. This stagflation-inspired nightmare describes an America just a matchstick, a bomb away from utter social chaos.
Better Days is set in permanently depressed Lowell, Massachusetts, where the local plant closed a long time ago and the only jobs left are in the poorly paying service industry. Ray and Fay, a couple of working stiffs, are trying to get by in a world that no longer makes sense. Still, there are signs of hope, however meager. Ray, for one, is convinced he has prophetic powers: whenever he wears a helmet fitted with a pair of TV antennae, he hears voices telling him to found the True Value Church. For another, a mysterious, vaguely threatening stranger has come to Lowell, bringing with him the hope for a bright economic future in the guise of a career as a free-lance arsonist.
So long as Dresser’s pessimistic predictions about the economy prove false, WYSIWYG’s future seems bright.
It’s amazing how many laughs Napier and his company of gifted actors–among them Ed Furman as Chip, Ellen Stoneking as Enid, Tom Booker as Bo, and Zook as Judith–are able to wring from the simple premise: that every event, no matter how awful or universe shattering, is to be treated as a sitcom crisis, resolved as quickly and as superficially as possible. After the show’s climax–in which three characters are killed in a matter of minutes–the message we’re supposed to take away is the disgustingly sweet “There’s a little bit of the Antichrist in all of us.”
