MAKING NOISE QUIETLY
“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” –Dwight D. Eisenhower
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“Being Friends” is straightforward and disarming. Two men, misfits for different reasons, meet in a Kentish field near the end of World War II. Eric Faber (James Marsters) is a gay artist and novelist with a fractured spine and tuberculosis. Oliver Bell (Andrew Scott) is a Quaker and a conscientious objector who has tended the wounded in a burn ward.
Though Zak tightly confines the action to a narrow upstage rectangle, the acting is as natural and unforced as Holman’s ambling dialogue; this casual meeting never loses its eavesdropping charm. Marsters looks much healthier than his character, but that’s no big problem because our last impression should be of Eric’s resilience. Scott’s Oliver has all the decency of a man who needs to justify–or abandon–the pacifist credo he’s suffered from.
Sam’s response to his stepfather’s violence, and to the punishment his hard mother gave him for his bedwetting, is to stop talking; he communicates by writing on his arm. This resistance only worsens the stepfather’s mean streak, a trait the playwright rather tenuously connects to Alan’s self-hatred and the violence he learned in the Falklands. Helene believes that to help others you have to take the risk of being wrong and getting hurt. Trying to reach Sam, she offers him the things he tried to steal, but only if he will say thank you. At first her bullying torments Sam more than his father’s slaps, but it finally leads to a sort of breakthrough for him–and for Alan, who in time might learn to forgive himself for directing his anger at Sam.
Yet for all its putrid, sophomoric, misogynistic, homophobic, and racist overkill, Eat proves itself more often than not a scummy delight. Like Christopher Durang’s The Nature and Purpose of the Universe (an equally vicious anti-Catholic send-up that, compared to this offense, seems gentle), Eat focuses on an elaborately suffering mother who is surrounded by a dangerous family. Subject to regular fainting spells and Valium binges, Mom Smith is a nonstop martyr. No wonder. Dad is a foul-mouthed, alcoholic pedophile; daughter Susan is a bulimic, pregnant whore who’d have an abortion except that she wants to sell the kid for $50,000 “provided it’s white”; son Jerry is gay but thinks he’s a black lesbian (and puts on blackface to prove it); and younger son Arthur is a mean punk and doper with a menacing mohawk and a pea brain who shakes down Mom for $100 in lunch money. They regularly curse, kick, and slap Mom, who takes it all–even the cocaine in the cookie jar–with saintly forbearance. What a gal!
