SORE THROATS
Commons Theatre
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Seeing her misery, Jack offers the classic blame-the-victim cop-out: “You can’t live in pain all the time.” Because he wants to force Judy to sign over a settlement he had promised her, he begins to slap and kick her with almost ritualized violence, declaring “Torture makes the world go round.” When she disobeys an order and tries to crawl away, he kicks her again and again until she gives him the money.
When Jack returns a few moments later to retrieve a favorite pocketknife (he calls it his “little friend”), Judy isn’t alone. Sally, a scrappy dame with punk hair, has just arrived to look for lodgings. No human punching bag, Sally is used to dealing with human squalor (“You open any door and you find you’re in an abattoir”), so when Jack menaces her, Sally knocks him flat with her purse. Then she decides to move in with Judy.
Emphasizing the ritual side of their tragedy with candies and a censer, Patricca also wants to convey the simultaneous realities around it: he introduces a director working on a film version of the lover’s death and a woman in black who sits at the side of the stage in perpetual mourning. He also includes a rather precious monologue in which a San Francisco man with AIDS wonders why “I’m dying and I’m beautiful,” a description of Goethe’s intolerance of Sicilian rites, a gloss on the origin of the tarantella, letters to the playwright (one describes an American version of the Italian suicides that’s complicated by AIDS), and old Sicilian lamentations in which the singers create haunting vibrations by singing directly into each other’s throats.
