FEAST OF ILLUSIONS
Still, in the theater of beginning playwrights, all you need is to get your people to chugalug and old friends start to dig up skeletons and hang out dirty linen as if it were sweeps week in the soaps. God forbid that anyone should down a few drinks and not have a hideous secret ready to explode at the drop of a climax. There’s no easier exposition than the “revelations” that come from the bottom of the bottle. Nor costlier, if you consider credibility.
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Even booze and pot together aren’t enough to expose the lies behind this marriage, however. You need a third party. Enter Wendy, Sarah’s former college roommate and, like Sarah, one of Richard’s former students. Armed with a PhD in “feminist studies,” Wendy is not only up for a job at Richard’s school, she’s got some unfinished personal business. We learn that during a civil rights march, Richard really did make love, not war–to Wendy, violently. She went on to have an abortion, a nervous breakdown, and some very intensive therapy. Clearly Richard’s idealism is highly selective.
Jim MacDowell’s staging doesn’t exactly set fire to the script but it keeps things moving, and the plot’s machinery shows through only sporadically. Even the obvious choices–like playing the rape revelation under lurid red lighting–perversely fit the plot’s one-size-fits-all solutions.
