LAST RITES
Paired with Horton Foote’s The One-Armed Man, Talk to Me Like the Rain starts off an evening titled “Last Rites,” which explores death, desire, personal deception, and public hypocrisy. At first glance the two one- acts don’t seem compatible–the Williams piece is lyrical and moody, the Foote piece jaunty and violent. But both stories concern lost, tortured souls who yearn to confess their sins but dread accepting responsibility for their actions. And in both cases, but particularly in Talk to Me Like the Rain, the Cactus Theatre shines.
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But what they want is not forgiveness, that simple pardoning of sins. They want absolution, a wiping clean of the slate. Forgiveness requires acknowledgment, even repentance; absolution, on the other hand, demands that there be no record at all of the infraction. It calls for a mutual forgetfulness, a willingness to trust even after trust has been broken. It seems inevitable that gaining absolution means losing something, whether it’s pride or respect or hope.
The ending to The One-Armed Man is easier to see coming than the ending to Talk to Me Like the Rain, not so much because of the script as because of a pair of small yet critical falterings on the part of Michael Shuler, who plays Ned. Shuler needs to better pace his character’s fury: he worked up to full temper early in the play and had virtually nothing left in him by the time the script called for catharsis. His poor planning gave away the ending.
