BLACKHEART
Bailiwick Repertory deserves some credit for providing Chuck Ferrero, a young, inexperienced playwright, with a place to practice his craft. With time, Ferrero might become a competent playwright.
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But believe me, you don’t want this rookie practicing his craft on you now. Ferrero’s play Blackheart is a monument to pretension, incoherence, and ineptitude. Aspiring to be a sprawling epic about hypocrisy and evil, it is in actuality a juvenile fantasy constructed out of fragments collected from popular films and TV shows. In fact, Ferrero borrows so voraciously that Blackheart is just a few short steps from being a spoof of the trashy melodrama Americans love. But satire requires a sense of humor, and Ferrero obviously takes himself very, very seriously.
Ferrero has included all this and more, making Blackheart a vivid example of what happens to the human mind when it’s been exposed to too much television and too few books. The plot in itself shows the author’s limited knowledge and stunted imagination. And the dialogue suggests that Ferrero’s ability to communicate has been impaired as well. “Why do you stay here?” Susan asks a U.S. doctor who, works in the war-torn country. “You ask hard questions,” the doctor replies. “That’s my job,” Susan intones.
