Posted on: Friday, November 1, 2002
STAGE REVIEW
Play's audience may crave antidepressants
By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic
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| Mariko Newbauer and Brent Reynolds in a scene from "Crave," an experimental work by British playwright Sarah Kane.
Advertiser library photo |
"Do you hear voices?"
"Only when they talk to me."
Sarah Kane's "Crave" has been called a fugue for four voices, and in its Late Night production at the Kennedy Laboratory Theatre, the voices play as disjointed demons that question incessantly without finding answers.
Kane committed suicide in 1999 at the age of 28. During her short career, this British playwright offended many critics with her dramatic examination of dark places, festering emotional sores and contaminated motives. In "Crave," suffering and confusion coat the fractured dialogue. Words become tortured musical phrases that come together aurally, although not always cognitively. There is no traditional character, plot, or action. There is only mood — and that hangs perilously close to despair and chaos. The four voices grope through a fog of desire toward a love that cannot distinguish between pleasure and pain.
• 11 p.m. today and tomorrow • Earle Ernst Lab Theater • $7 • 956-7655 "I love your scar. I love everything about you that hurts."
Director Taurie Kinoshita stages the play on an essentially bare stage, with four actors frozen into positions with distinctive props.
One woman's hands are tied with a length of rough rope. Another gazes into a lipstick-stained mirror.
One man fondles a headless dress dummy. Another reclines against a guitar case, surrounded by liquor bottles and cigarette stubs.
They seem to represent a pair of couples that continually shift connections and often join together into a quartet of shared commentary. Each represents a single voice and a collective anguish.
In addition to the four speakers, Kinoshita places three non-speaking characters upstage center. A young woman in a simple slip lies before a white sheet that appears to be spattered with blood. She is intermittently joined by a father who beats her and a lover who strips her naked and sexually assaults her.
With this added staging, audience attention focuses on the non-speakers, while the spoken words take second position as accompaniment to the pantomime. Only at the end of the play do the speakers move, and then it is to assume each other's positions — seemingly to begin again.
The production offers many adjectives — none of them uplifting. It suggests that we are helplessly drawn to our dark side and, thus, like a moth to a flame, should enter it willingly rather than struggle against it.
This might be an interesting place to temporarily visit, secure within the theater's conventional four walls. But to live there? That way madness lies.
'Crave'
