EVIL TRIGGERS DOWN AMATEUR STREET
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So a play like Beau O’Reilly’s dark comedy Evil Triggers Down Amateur Street is refreshing. This antirealistic play foils every attempt to take it as a mirror held up to the world. True, O’Reilly does start out with a framework that could have been lifted from any odd B movie or Mamet play: a pair of petty con men, Jack Sugar and Arson Fix, set about gathering the personnel and know-how to pull off “the big grab”–kidnapping Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. However, no sooner does O’Reilly set this story in motion–Sugar hires a young apprentice and begins teaching him how to become a master grifter–than he abandons it. The last half of the play shows what happens when the four odd characters in Sugar’s “gang” are cooped up together in his hideout.
O’Reilly further undercuts the realistic plot by having characters speak a kind of poetry reminiscent of film noir tough-guy talk: “The crowd was all red eyes on red necks,” Arson Fix says at one point. O’Reilly also disrupts the play’s serious tone with moments of absurd comedy, such as the revelation that Sugar’s hideout is really a tree house. “This isn’t a house, this is a fort!” says apprentice con Max when he first sees Sugar’s place. And Sugar and Fix have continual nonsensical arguments over which Stone was better, Jagger or Richards.
Evil Triggers is not a production that will appeal to everyone. Those who expect to get their theater straight will find this play particularly frustrating. Those willing to accept the play’s decidedly antirealistic conventions, however, will discover in Evil Triggers the sort of dreamworld that reflects a nation’s fears and wishes much more accurately than any bit of real life tossed squirming onto the stage.
