FORTY-DEUCE
Horizons Productions
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Seen in 1981 in an off-Broadway production starring Kevin Bacon and Orson Bean and first presented in Chicago several years ago at the Theatre Building under Harriet Spizziri’s direction, Alan Bowne’s Forty-Deuce is a rich, raw satire on corporate capitalism from the viewpoint of the hustlers’ underworld. Suggesting a cross between David Mamet’s American Buffalo, Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End, and William Burroughs’s The Wild Boys, Forty-Deuce nonetheless has the fierce feel of having been lived by its author before it was written; whether or not Bowne ever worked the 42nd Street meat market, he sure knew its style and its sound. (Bowne later wrote the AIDS allegory Beirut, before dying of AIDS himself in 1987.)
As the situation comes to a crisis–the 12-year-old turns up dead of an overdose–Ricky’s schemes get even crazier, until he finds himself caught in the trap of his own deficit spending. Like Robert Stempel, who this week was forced out as General Motors’ chairman, Ricky finds that when you play for big stakes you risk failing in a big way–but at General Motors they don’t tear your lips off or grind glass in your eyes. At least I don’t think so. Yet Bowne’s point is that in the consumer-service biz all men are whores, and all whores are only as good as their current cash flow.
A boy (Friedman) is brought to an isolated apartment by a man (the very able and frequently moving John Berczeller) for sexual fun and games; but the games get less fun as they turn from sexual to psychological. The customer turns the tables on the boy by telling him he’s a prisoner; alternately threatening and pleading, he tries to get the boy to promise to stay with him–and brandishes a gun when the youth tries to get away. The man’s wish is obsessively simple: don’t leave me, he begs. And he implies he’ll go to violent lengths to prevent the boy from leaving.
