THE BIG SHOE
The play–an incredibly silly meditation on psychiatry, fear, and hopelessness–is a mess. It takes place in a mental ward where the innovative head shrink, a fellow named Goddard, pummels his patients in order to modify behavior. Christopher, his latest victim, has been brought to the ward after being found babbling to a hill of ants in an alley next to his house. He’s been contemplating suicide. To make matters weirder, he keeps talking about a “big shoe.”
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“It’s against the law to take your own life,” Goddard, inexplicably dressed in running togs, tells the catatonic Christopher when he’s first brought to him. After beating Christopher up and injecting him full of drugs, Goddard instructs him to re-create the events that brought him to the ward.
He does, however, have a knack for establishing the utter boredom of Christopher’s life. Eventually he winds up in bed, staring at the walls. There he watches an ant run around in figure eights. As he jabbers on about how the figure eights remind him of ice skating, Christopher slowly but surely begins to lose his mind. It’s not clear why or how it happens. It just does. When he smashes the ant with his shoe, he hears a scream and a crunching sound, and the “metamorphosis” is supposedly complete. The mystery of the big shoe is established and destroyed in about three seconds flat.
