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Gyroscopic Descent Into Pain
| Article
# : |
16741 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1989 |
912 Words |
| Author
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Nicholas Rudall
Nicholas Rudall is artistic director of the Court Theatre,
Chicago, and professor of classics at the University of
Chicago. |
The Speed of Darkness is a new play by Steve Tesich. Recently presented by the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, it will, I am sure, make its way rapidly into the repertoire of American regional theater. Tesich is probably best known for his screenplays: Eyewitness, Four Friends, The World According to Garp, Eleni, and Breaking Away--for which he won an Academy Award in 1980. He has also written extensively for the theater, including Touching Bottom and Division Street. The Speed of Darkness is an ambitious, brave, if somewhat flawed work.
The play is set in a small town in South Dakota, where Joe and his wife, Ann, appear to be living the American Dream. He is a successful building contractor, she a contented and proud wife. They are happily married, comfortably in love. Their daughter, Mary, is about to leave for college. As the play opens we learn that Joe has just been nominated as South Dakota's "man of the year."
This all sounds too blissful to be true, of course, but this is part of Tesich's theatrical game. The first scene of the play is a positive avalanche of clichés. It resembles a television sitcom, it sounds like a television sitcom, and I, for one, felt distinctly uneasy at the prospect of two more hours of predictable jokes and predictable daughters hugging predictable fathers being predictably indulgent. The first stylistic hint that Tesich is playing a theatrical game is the news that real estate developers are announcing plans to build a housing development on one of the great mesas that the family can see from the big picture window in the house that Joe built himself. It signals in a simple, uncomplicated way the destruction of a
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