HURLYBURLY
Cactus Theatre’s revival renews your faith in non-Equity theater–a triumph of casting that yields committed, natural performances worthy of the preinstitutional Steppenwolf. Clearly many well-spent rehearsals have gone into making Rabe’s slice of death stunning and spontaneous. Cactus’s version holds its own even compared to the Goodman’s memorable, star-studded 1984 premiere (a staging that I recall slightly succumbed to the play’s freak-show overkill).
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Rabe’s Eddie, a coke-snorting casting director, has a resonance much beyond Hollywood–he’s a virtual lab specimen from a self-absorbed decade. Addicted to evasion, a master of passive aggression, Eddie controls people by setting up ugly scenes, then blames the victim for confirming his own cynicism. Eddie is a solid citizen of a town in which lies are the unofficial currency, and he reflects this perverse two-dimensional television world: he can’t bring himself to feel genuinely (if only he could be as mad as hell, like Peter Finch in Network). He’s the human analogue of the TV set, which is like a second drug to him. For him, Johnny Carson’s monologues are just as real or unreal as news footage of children squashed on the sidewalk after jumping from a building on fire.
Eddie, his roommate and colleague Mickey, and Eddie’s buddy Phil (an unemployed actor) suffer from bad marriages for a reason: their relations with women are reduced to mere scorecards. Eddie and Mickey quarrel over Darlene, a photojournalist who’s wise to Eddie in ways he can’t stand. Violently unstable, Phil takes his failure out on all around him. But he’s especially hard on Donna, a burnt-out teenage runaway whom the roommates take in as a sexual playmate–calling her their “CARE package”–and on Bonnie, a good-time girl and full-time coke fiend.
Though, like everyone here, he’s younger than his part, Michael Shuler sweats out Eddie like a fever; he shows us not only the guy’s prickly defensiveness, halfhearted male bonding, and insufferable sarcasm but the crucial endangered idealism that these evasions so feebly protect. When Eddie cracks under the strain of too many guilty feelings, we sense just how hard it was for him to waste his energy warding off life.
