RECKLESS
Throughout, playwright Craig Lucas takes limp satiric aim at a variety of easy targets–Christmas sentimentality, the psychiatry industry, TV game shows, the computer revolution–while visiting upon Rachel a seemingly endless assortment of gratuitous calamities. Loved ones and strangers drop around her left and right, at times the innocent victims of a murderer whose target was Rachel herself.
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In a play loaded with misanthropic and misogynistic ridicule of its characters, Susan Nussbaum as Pooty submits to a role that exploits every snickering sick-humor stereotype that has accompanied, and limited, the image of disabled people. This is ironic, given the work Nussbaum–wheelchair-bound herself since an accident several years ago–has done as an actress, director, and activist to affirm the dignity of disabled people.
