WHAT I NEED IS A GOOD BONK ON THE HEAD
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Wait–characters from a play stepping out into reality to tell their own stories? Didn’t Pirandello do something like this back in 1921? In Six Characters in Search of an Author, however, the playwright has died even before the play begins, so he can’t rescue his blameless characters from their difficulties. Anton is very much alive and healthy, but egocentrically indifferent to anyone else, in fact or fiction. With a man of such limited imagination controlling their fate, his two characters–Shirley and a man who chooses the name “Desk” for himself–fear that their destinies will consist of nothing more than death by gratuitous violence. Taking preventive action while Anton sleeps, they compose names, personalities, and identities for themselves until they become powerful enough to imprison Anton in his own script and confront him with his irresponsibility toward his art, his audiences, and humanity in general.
If this proposition makes some playwrights in the audience nervous, that’s precisely what Adam Langer intends in What I Need is a Good Bonk on the Head. En route to his humane and astonishingly logical solution–for Langer is a far better playwright than his protagonist–there are spoofs of various theatrical genres. (The Chicago School: “Sweaty, allegorical, and say “fuck’ a lot. . . “Oh, what a motherfucking rogue and peasant piece of shit am I.”‘) But there are also some surprisingly insightful and elegantly indirect observations on the nature of fiction writing–surprising because they reiterate principles so basic that no one should have to remind us of them: showing instead of telling, and creating whole characters, plausible situations, and believable endings. Unfortunately, a look at the plays of the recent past will serve to demonstrate that a reminder is badly needed. (You know who you are.)
