SCROUNGING CHANGE
Joe Larocca has discovered a way to do this, too: his characters seem to be giving uncensored voice to some vast reservoir of distress that he harbors within himself. Their monologues are rants–fevered confessions of hatred, or impassioned complaints. They don’t speak their feelings, they spew them out, as though venting some of the anger and fear building up in Larocca’s mind.
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The problem is, Larocca exerts very little control over his writing. It is certainly spontaneous and original, but unlike other playwrights who eventually learn how to shape such raw material into sustained drama, Larocca just lets it gush. His pieces explode like flashbulbs, providing bursts of blinding light, but then they quickly burn out. His recent collection of monologues, Scrounging Change, is more like performance art than drama, but it’s disturbing stuff whatever you choose to call it.
The violence is not always so overt and intimidating, but it’s never entirely absent. “Wax” is about a young working-class couple held together by poverty, depicted by a long chain that joins them at the ankles. In another engaging performance, Spinuzza portrays the man as intelligent, sincere, and likable. But even this seemingly gentle man gets up early every morning and reads the paper carefully so he’ll know “what area of the world is fucked up.” Then he fantasizes about getting a job “carrying cameras” in one of those trouble spots and getting paid “a shitload” for accepting such a dangerous assignment. His wife, portrayed by the intense Katherine Chronis, fantasizes about becoming an assassin. “I know what it means to slit a throat, to cut the umbilical cord of affection,” she says.
