CAT’S-PAW
Extremities, for example, offers a delicious revenge fantasy: a young woman subdues her rapist and tortures him. In Nanawatai, Mastrosimone focuses on the rage aroused by war. The playwright spent several weeks in Afghanistan with Afghani rebels during the Soviet invasion. After witnessing the execution of a Russian tank crew, he wrote a play recounting the incident through the eyes of a rebel as well as the eyes of one of the crew members. Shivaree is about a perennial source of rage: a young man’s struggle to escape his overprotective mother.
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And now the Temporary Theatre Company is staging Cat’s-Paw, which deals with no less than three causes of rage: industrial pollution, terrorism, and obnoxious TV reporters. That may sound like a feast, but Mastrosimone rigs the play so that it’s very difficult to get angry about all three at once. If you get really worked up about pollution, then the terrorists opposing it start to seem sympathetic. But if terrorism upsets you more, then the pollution doesn’t seem so bad.
Why Jessica? She’s not a major star, and her career seems to be languishing. But Victor says he has admired her “ever since that story where you waited all night behind a tree on the riverbank, when you flicked on your camera lights and caught that creep in that phony milk truck dumping sulphuric acid in the river.” Victor perceives Jessica as a friend of the environment and assumes that she will be sympathetic to him and his cause.
Kim Swinton provides a strong performance in the small role of Cathy, the loyal soldier who brings Jessica to the warehouse; but Josh White III fails to give David Darling, the hapless hostage, the shifty intelligence the character requires.
