Cat’s-Paw
I may be in the minority here, but I wanted the Unabomber to make sense, to be an eloquent spokesperson against a society that has become progressively more polluted, inhumane, and mechanical. Though his actions are barbaric and indefensible, if he’d been able to write he might at least have ignited some intelligent debate. But the rambling, 35,000-word screed that found its way into the Washington Post was little more than familiar antitechnological rant laced with dull, bizarre, and bigoted blather about his problems with feminism and the African-American family. The bomb he’d hoped to drop on the American public was little more than a fizzling dud that could only have come from the pen of a paranoid madman and C student.
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William Mastrosimone’s newly updated 1985 Cat’s-Paw, concerning a small environmental terrorist group that holds a nation hostage to its plea for ecological purity, represents a golden opportunity to make the radical progreen statement that no genuine human being seems able to make. Instead of sparking a discussion of issues, though, Mastrosimone just gives us another murderous nut whose actions are all too easy to dismiss. Mastrosimone may be sitting on dynamite, but he can’t strike the match that will ignite it.
Though Mastrosimone gives us dribs and drabs about Victor’s past as a philosophy professor and a deluded, guilt-ridden environmental activist, the character remains a cipher, offering little more than canned enviro rant and stock menace. “I am the rage you feel but do not have the guts to act on,” Victor asserts. Would that he were. One feels absolutely no empathy with this emotionless murderer and blowhard. Ditto for Lyons, who could just as well be called Tough Reporter #1, readily packaged for Jane Fonda or Sigourney Weaver. Imagine Fonda in The China Syndrome interviewing the nuclear reactor instead of Jack Lemmon, and you have an idea of the main characters’ interactions. Directing for Strawdog Theatre Company, Richard Shavzin gets about as much as can be expected out of Gordon Reinhart and Adrianne Cury in the lead roles. The tension of their situation makes the play watchable, but Shavzin is unable to make them human beings.
