SLOW DANCE ON THE KILLING GROUND
Touchstone Theatre’s production of Slow Dance on the Killing Ground provides a textbook example of why a theater company should remain faithful to the original words of a playwright. The company veers away from William Hanley’s script only on a couple of occasions, but that changes the play, muddling its meaning. Rather than being a play about truths hidden beneath lies, it becomes a play in which truths and lies are indistinguishable.
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Hanley’s much-praised 1964 script is structured like a whodunit, so the audience has to try to deduce what ails the three troubled characters. On a warm spring night in Brooklyn a halting, apathetic European immigrant named Glas is getting set to close up his soda fountain and candy shop when Randall, a spastically flamboyant African American teenage genius, barges in seeking shelter from the law. Hanley gives us initially satisfying answers to the two questions immediately on our minds: Why is Glas so dour? And what’s making Randall run? He informs us that Glas was once a disillusioned German communist who was tortured in a concentration camp for his political beliefs and Randall is an unloved child who’s committed some manner of horrible crime. Then he introduces Rosie, a miserable young Jewish college student who’s also running from something.
Director Jonathan Wilson also makes a peculiar choice at the end of the play. In Hanley’s script the three characters stand back to back as Glas lights the memorial candle, creating an air of sanctity and safety apart from the outside world. In Wilson’s version Randall has already bolted out the door, creating an awkward moment between Glas and Rosie rather than an almost religious one between the three of them. Instead of exploring the links between the three characters, as Hanley clearly intended, Wilson focuses our attention on the dangers that await Randall, giving the conclusion a seriously diminished sense of closure. This ending raises even more questions for which Touchstone doesn’t seem to have answers.
