THE AMERICAN CLOCK
And that’s natural–even healthy, if it helps us figure out what’s been happening to us. How we got to this time of plague, debt, and homelessness, when public malfeasance and corporate greed are not only rampant but considered to be, well, kinda sexy.
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Trouble is, our hindsight’s so bad. Of the shows mentioned above, only Animal Farm is a genuine success, making a concise, coherent, painfully vivid statement about the subversion and destruction of an ideal. About the precise means by which a revolution gets turned inside out.
It’s an eerily familiar trip. Miller shows us farm auctions in Iowa and collapsing card houses in New York. He takes us through a newborn welfare system–already forcing honest people into ethical pretzels so that they can qualify for a few measly, crucial bucks–and a radically polarized class system, where penthouse dwellers on Riverside Drive have a view of tin shacks on the Hudson. Most tellingly, he reminds us that big companies used the Depression as an opportunity–as leverage, so to speak–for gobbling up smaller ones.
Though, in this lovely Court Theatre production, a fairly decent cry isn’t entirely out of the question. Laura Whyte and Bob Zrna are especially evocative as the slowly crumbling Baum parents. Patrick Clear justifies his surname with his cool, lucid performances as GE president Quinn and dentist Joe. There’s a bone-dry pain that comes through in the pas de deux between Clear’s Joe and Kate Buddeke’s hardened–yet delicately played–whore.
