MUD
Fornes’s 1983 script Mud is so tense it’s nearly unbearable–especially in Big Nose Theater’s claustrophobic space on North Avenue. In this play Fornes makes the usual demands on her audience, then asks for a certain courage and patience, too.
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The story involves Mae, a young backwoods woman who is urgently trying to overcome her circumstances. As the play opens, she is ironing men’s pants and telling Lloyd, the dumb, puppylike man who shares her home, about school. She’s learning to read and to do arithmetic. When she talks about her education, it’s still so mysterious and holy to her that she can treat a simple numerical equation like a Eucharist.
Mae is disgusted. Lloyd is a man so literally sick that he smells putrid. She’s convinced he’s rotting from the inside out. “You’re a pig,” she tells him. “You’re going to die in the mud.” Mae wants him to go to the clinic, but Lloyd won’t go unless he can take with him a large, menacing ax. They’re at a stalemate.
Surely it is Fornes’s catastrophic invention that shifts the direction of the story so dramatically at this point; but in Big Nose’s production, it’s Scott Stuart as Lloyd who makes the earth move. “Can he do this?” Lloyd demands of Mae (Lauren Love), leaping about the furniture as if he were flying, running and falling and flying again. The Big Nose space has room for no more than a couple of dozen people at once, and Stuart seemed to be soaring above our heads. He was exhilarating, simply stupendous. When Mae explains to Lloyd that what has happened doesn’t mean the end of their association with Henry but a longer, more dependent relationship to one another, Stuart’s Lloyd drops, in body and spirit. Then he throws up, spitting out hope as if it were poison.
