Anachronisms
You’d be hard-pressed to find two more different living playwrights writing in English than Harold Pinter and Sam Shepard. Yet here they are together, each represented by two one-acts, in Azusa Productions’ “Perfectly Pinter” at 8 and “Late-Night Shepard” at 10.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In Pinter’s world yes means no, and no means fuck off. Sometimes even yes means fuck off. While in Shepard’s world everything really means yes. Yes, we are family. Yes, we are free. Yes, ain’t it good to be alive. Only you gotta cuss and spit and wear cowboy boots, otherwise people will think you’re a sissy–which also says a lot about the differences between Brits and Americans.
The character’s isolation in this fairly recent Pinter play is very real: she’s a prisoner in her own body who describes being locked in a coma as “a vast series of halls” with lots of mirrored windows so that “glass reflects glass. For ever and ever.” Yet oddly enough this woman’s isolation feels much less terrifying than the sterile separateness of the stuffy, bourgeois British couple at the center of the other Pinter play on the bill, A Slight Ache. Written originally as a radio play and broadcast on BBC radio in 1959, this is a powerful hour-long work that begins as a send-up of claustrophobic lower-middle-class marriages–Edward and Flora engage in some of the most mindless conversation this side of the breakfast dialogues in Pinter’s The Birthday Party–but becomes a meditation on the human tendency to project our deepest fears and hopes onto others. In this case it’s a poor, silent match seller who’s invited into Edward and Flora’s home. Without saying a word, or even moving a muscle, he seduces Flora, who removes his dirt-encrusted shirt and runs her hands over his passive, bare chest, and defeats Edward, who tries to get the best of the stranger verbally and is instead bested himself.
Killer’s Head is followed by a longer, much sillier play. The Unseen Hand is Shepard’s foray into sci-fi, which he combines with his favorite milieu: the world of cowboys in the west. The intensely trippy story concerns a 120-year-old cowboy named Blue, the only surviving member of a Jesse James-like gang gunned down in the late 1800s. He joins forces with an escaped alien slave named Willie who wants to free his alien-slave cohorts on another planet. To do this Willie must resurrect Blue’s brothers Cisco and Sycamore, which they do in short order, only–well, actually to summarize the whole of this one-act is ridiculous. All you really need to know is that Shepard packs it with enough action for two full-length plays. Guns are fired, brothers wrestle, and a pint-size alien writhes and curses under the power of the unseen hand, an occult power that keeps him from rising up against his masters.
