Eclipse Theatre Delivers an Absurdist Delight

When something this wild is that wonderful, you can expect praise to flow far and wide.  Eclipse Theatre’s season closes big this winter with Christopher Durang’s wonderfully absurdist jewel, Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them, now playing to contented audiences at the Athenaeum. The title tells both everything about the play and nothing about it.  It’s not until after you’ve experienced this wise and raucous story do you realize how appropriate that gangly handle is. 

Selecting Durang as the single playwright the theatre company would be featuring this season has proven to be very rewarding.  A distinctively original contemporary dramatist, Durang’s view of the world and the way he comments on it can catch you off guard and challenge the way you digest a plot.  With his uncanny knack for making the ridiculous plausible, he subverts reality and, at least in Why Torture, turns the absurd into hilarious high art.  All in the interest in helping us see the world we live in new ways and offering better ways for responding to it.  Thanks to superb direction from Steve Scott and a cast that’s tight, razor sharp and savvy, the play makes us laugh at the travesties lamentably caustic culture wars have visited upon us.

Written in 2009, Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them is a young play.  When it played in the East Village a decade ago, the laughing was more uneasy and cautionary; if it occurred much at all.  Then, the Bush administration was attempting to justify anti-terrorism measures that including torture techniques outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Timing made aspects of the play more disturbing; even when placed on a platform with a strong levity component.

When Felicity (Tracey Green) and Zamir (Siddhartha Rajan) hook up one night as total strangers at Hooter’s, snowballing events couldn’t have more disastrous results. They meet, get black belt smashed and end up a married couple the next morning.  For Felicity, it was bad enough to wake up in the arms of a total stranger. With no recall of what happened the night before, Zamir’s blithe explanation that a person with a license to perform marriages legally joined them in matrimony, her distress is raw and palpable.  We also learn later a date rape drug was involved in the previous night’s escapades.

From there, and under Scott’s beautifully calibrated direction, Durang continues to nudge the absurdist envelop; allowing mayhem to take root as he develops his characters.  Zamir would have been enough of a wild card to contend with in any play.  As seen in Beyond Therapy, also a Durang play featured in this year’s Eclipse season, Mr. Rajan has a gift for consuming a stage.  His lightning responses can flash with such intensity and ferocity they simultaneously disarm and transfix.  When Felicity tries to gently quiz him about who he is and what he does for a living because she’d just like to know something about the man she married, it becomes clear he’s far too volatile to bear even light inquiry and unleashes a bruising tirade of recrimination.   Calming down, he takes ownership of his violent temper and confesses he’s been known to hurt women.  Terrifying words in any context.  Felicity doesn’t know if she has a serial killer on her hands or a terrorist.  We come to appreciate her ability to sustain a sense of equanimity and balance in a tale gorged with dysfunction. 

An arch-conservative who sees the world locked in an “us vs. them” dichotomy, her father Leonard (Patrick Thornton), lives to root out and eradicate anything or anyone he perceives as a threat to the national peace.  Intractable, quick on the trigger and insufferable, it was inevitable that he and Zamir clash in their version of the testosterone wars.  By imbuing his character with so much natural near innocent conviction, Thornton makes an unforgettable Leonard.    

Felicity’s mother, Luella (Elaine Carlson), who’s internalized her suffering so effectively that you almost feel she’s succeeded in completely neutering it, placates others to soothe herself.  The ruse also gives her the space to repress her distain for her husband’s political views and minimize the danger he poses to others.  It’s easier to lose herself in extended and inane conversations with her daughter about theater, a subject Felicity despises.   Carlson turns Luella into a slightly more refined Edith Bunker; but with a marvelously intriguing dynamic side.

As the play rolls swiftly through the comically inconceivable, the audience is laughing and listening closely.  It knows it’s watching an aspect of the world it lives in.  One where stark political and social positions can calcify and lead to calamitous results.  Leonard’s views are hardly passive.  Collaborating with people who share his xenophobic stance and linked to a radical “shadow” government trolling for indications of active foreign infiltration, he slips off the deep end when Hildegard (Elizabeth Birnkrant), one of his zany operatives with underwear issues, spies on Zamir and misinterprets his conversation with Reverend Mike (John Arthur Lewis), the pornographer who officiated his marriage to Felicity.  Seeing Zamir trussed, gagged and interrogated in Leonard’s secret room changes the stakes for everyone.

It’s often a question among directors and dramaturges at this juncture of the play to ask how much blood to use in a pivotal scene.  As true in Sunday afternoon’s performance, any is enough to stun the audience and make the theater shudder.  Blood’s the visual proof that events, misunderstandings and intellectual inflexibility can and do fuse to deliver calamity. 

A narrator, (Devon Nimerfroh), lightens the shock and helps unpack the dismay by using deadpan humor to mock senseless brutality.  Something Nimerfroh accomplices beautifully with cool pacing and suave delivery.

Using a ploy common in the movies, Durang does us a favor by allowing us to see how things might end differently if people would allow themselves the capacity to make different choices. By sharing that opportunity, he’s both delivering a message and making a plea.   One that we all would be wise to heed.

Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them

Eclipse Theater

Nov 14 – Dec 15, 2019

Athenaeum Theatre

2936 N. Southport Avenue

Chicago, IL  60657

www.eclipsetheatre.com

773-935-6875