DOWN THE ROAD
Triumvirate Productions at Cafe Voltaire
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The play hinges on what Reach will tell and when. When it opens, Dan and Iris are holed up in a hotel ten miles from the maximum-security prison where Reach is. It seems that they’re a pretty happy couple–all they have to do is work on the book and try to conceive a child. The two alternate visits to the prison. As one interviews Reach, the other records random impressions of the local landscape: the strip malls, the McDonald’s, the ramshackle houses, the interstate highway. “Hopeless town,” Iris says into her tape recorder while standing in the generic hotel room. “Empty lives. Wilderness that’s approaching biblical.”
This mundane world is juxtaposed with Reach’s horrific stories. At first he answers questions in a cut-and-dried manner, giving specific details concerning the age of his victims, their clothing, how he raped and murdered them and then dumped their bodies near Sugar Lake. Slowly his stories and matter-of-fact attitude work on Dan and Iris’s happy little world.
Blessing’s forte seems to be the psychological drama. His 1991 play Independence digs deep into the psyches of an unstable mother and her three daughters as it explores the evolution of their relations. Fraught with the sort of familial tension that sends people into intense psychotherapy, Independence has the potential to run an audience through the wringer.
