HYENA
So when the lights came up and Nick, a seriously disturbed teenager, gave a troubled and angry monologue about how he hated his life–“I don’t like the real world anymore”–you could almost hear all 50-plus brains in the tiny Shakespeare Street Theater humming with the same thought: “I guess he’s going to kill himself.” And that was that: we all knew where the play was going and how it was going to get there. That left only two questions unanswered. Which of the guns would he use? And how long before he used it? Happily, Schultz found a number of somewhat interesting side issues to keep the whole thing going until the other shoe dropped (with a clunk).
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The story itself makes for a very odd family melodrama. Nick’s parents, Jack and Grace, have recently split up (although they’re not divorced yet), and Jack now lives with one of Nick’s high school teachers, Dawn. This understandably bothers Nick a lot, especially since he has a crush on Dawn. Besides, his only real friend in the world, his mother’s father, has recently died. Nick withdraws from his family and spends his time in his room reading Soldier of Fortune and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, giving angry, alienated, very oedipal monologues, and planning his glorious future as a survivalist commando.
This play has potential, mind you, as a darkly ironic tongue-in-cheek melodrama in the spirit of, say, Douglas Sirk’s movie melodramas of the 50s. But as a straight bit of American naturalism, Hyena just plain doesn’t work. The psychological motivations are all wrong. A man mourning his mother’s suicide would never display the gun she used in a case in his living room. A boy would never consider suicide because he discovers his father is not the monster he thought he was. And I’ll bet the families of teenagers who attempt suicide almost never make great strides in resolving deep psychological problems in the first days after the suicide attempt.
