THE SPEED OF DARKNESS
In Darkness the secret is literally buried. Joe, the one who buried it, is a self-made man living in a sprawling house he built himself. A respected citizen who endows playgrounds and helps kids find summer jobs, Joe shares his success with his adoring wife, Anne, and his bubbly daughter, Mary, a glowingly well-adjusted high school senior. Joe is even a contender for South Dakota’s “Man of the Year.” But the Joe we see is a man who’s very ambivalent about his success, who fears that any change might threaten his fragile happiness: “Everything suddenly seems just right, and I only wish it could all stop.”
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After such hubris, you know he’ll get it hard. The portentous first act teems with an almost Shakespearean foreshadowing of doom for this midwestern paradise. Mary, who’s full of her own forebodings, imagines a nemesis ready to come out of the plains to stalk them. Anne looks wise but acts worried. Joe is rankled by the hero worship lavished on him by Eddie, Mary’s idealistic boyfriend, the choruslike narrator who frames the play.
If Joe is meant as a symbol of what’s wrong with America, he’s so circumscribed that he lets a lot of other miscreants off the hook. Moreover, his particular situation does not offer much hope–he might easily have continued his cover-up–and his sandwich-board self-diagnosis provides little insight: “I feel like I got the problems of a great man and the inner resources of an ordinary guy.” Where’s Thoreau when you need him?
Brigitte Bako plays Mary, the innocent whom Joe calls his “little miracle,” with the required heartland spunk, but she’s so preternaturally perky at the beginning you wonder if her final despair isn’t also overplayed. Saddled with the editorializing role of boyfriend Eddie, who basically just reacts to the other characters, Andy Hirsch bounces from an uncritical adoration of Joe to a crushing disillusionment. (Eddie is given one very incisive observation, that each night his family is brought together by watching other people’s sufferings on TV.)
