ENEMIES OF THE MOON
It has to do with all these plays I’ve been seeing lately in which some horror, some awful foreign thing, makes its way into a family and destroys it. No, the thing’s not AIDS or cable television. It’s not really even a thing. At its most virulent, as in Maria Irene Fornes’s The Danube, it’s a kind of invisible vapor–or elusive germ or strangely attenuated bomb–that attacks a man and a woman, eventually destroying them, their loved ones, and maybe the world.
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The thing, whatever it is, is at the heart of each of these recently produced plays, taking on various forms and nuances, but always exhibiting the same basic pathology: first, a profound sense of contradiction between public and private faces–between the ugly business and the loving family, the cultivated ego and the low urge, the sick environment and the healthy self, good and evil–followed by a gradual weakening of the defenses, the immune system that keeps those faces separated; until what’s ugly and low and sick and evil invades what’s loving and cultivated and healthy and good.
Enemies of the Moon is a Malignancy Play. A messed up, powerful new work by Scott Turner, it tells the tale of a man named Pat who feels the evil of the world and his own desire for purity so acutely that he’s taken his wife and two teenage kids out to an isolated farmhouse, where he hopes to tend his garden and heal his wounds.
The tone is wildly uneven, unaccountably veering into slapstick toward the end–and the language gets abstruse when it should be most direct. But for all its problems, Enemies of the Moon has got something. A great passion. A great conviction. An intense belief in itself. A marvelous willingness to take huge theatrical leaps at the risk of ending up in a heap on the floor. As a director, Turner exploits the primitive technical resources of the storefront Theatre of the Reconstruction with consistent daring and inventiveness, turning a scarcity of lighting equipment, for instance, into a fascinating play of shadows. He also works extensively, disconcertingly, and very successfully with noise: the pounding of a hammer, the tapping of knuckles, the spilling of nails, the rhythm of prayer. Turner builds a contrapuntal, percussive fugue from these elements. He makes them the heartbeat of the play.
