Isn’t it funny how guns and cameras both shoot people? Well, no, not really; but it can be a stark and darkly comedic nuance to quibble about. And British playwright Chris Thorpe is really good at it: he’s got a keen ability to go straight to the heart by completely circumventing it. In his brilliant play Safety (part of a trilogy, though it more than stands alone), loose, fragmented, emotionally-wrought chunks of text carry more bite in one little mouthful than any slack-jawed proselytizing. Rather than speak to the ineffable “horrors of war,” Thorpe makes an awkward dinner party into “enemy lines” and treats words as bullets. And while that’s been done before, these characters have not: a war photographer, haunted by his 1/125th of a second stills; his wife, haunted by the realization she neither loves nor knows her husband anymore; and a blissfully ignorant stranger, who just happened to save their daughter from drowning.
[Read on] at New Theater Corps
No comments:
Post a Comment