GOD’S COUNTRY
Shattered Globe Theatre
But that’s something of a quibble: what Dietz has given us is less a play than a sledgehammer. It sets out to affect its audience, and never mind finesse. The outrage is genuine, the message fervent, the situations chilling. A Klansman soberly posits that abortion is a conspiracy to wipe out the white man and that 96 percent of all abortions are of white Aryans. A skinhead who confesses that he doesn’t want to hate anymore is nailed to a cross and brutalized by his comrades. Members of the quasi-religious Order are equipped with Mac 10 automatic weapons (capable of firing 900 rounds a minute) in their battle for God and a white nation. Tongue in cheek, Dietz also gives us two bumbling members of a fictional organization (I hope it’s fictional, but in the midst of all this documented insanity anything might be possible) called UCOCC–United Confederation of Concerned Conspiratologists–who insist that Ann Frank’s Diary was written by Aristotle Onassis. “Beware of the ridiculous,” one of them warns, suddenly ominous. “It will one day rule.”
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Howard Johnson is a stuffy novelist to whom it’s a source of delicious irony and great pride that a place built through the sweat of slaves now belongs to a black man. But in his attempt to supplant the old white masters he reveals his own shortcomings: he can’t hold on to his heritage and turn the tables at the same time. When he’s not being sickeningly condescending toward the old handyman and housekeeper who mysteriously claim to “come with the house,” he’s downright nasty to them. He treats his young wife Karen–an energetic city girl with little formal education but much common sense–as though she were rebellious but beloved chattel. He won’t allow her to get a job or hold a different opinion, and seeks to educate her Henry Higgins-style.
