SONG OF SAD YOUNG MEN
Wanna work some social commentary into your play? If you lack imagination, you can employ the Shout and Leave No Doubt approach. By cramming truisms into the mouths of characters whose main function is to trumpet your views, you may be certain that your audience will get your message. If viewers possess the capacity for rational thought, however, they might be put off by this patronizing approach, which cripples Kay Cosgriff’s leaden drama Blanket Hill, about the tragedy at Kent State.
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Carl Hancock-Rux’s Song of Sad Young Men is most successful when it employs the Shut Up approach, exploring the all-too-believable lives of everyday Americans who gather at Song’s Lounge, a seedy nightclub that provides little refuge from the bigotry, AIDS, homelessness, drug addiction, and gang warfare that have become commonplace. When the play veers off into passages of song, dance, and poetry in the Categorically Ahistorical Allegorical style, it loses its focus and intensity.
The only time Song of Sad Young Men falters is when Hancock-Rux strays from his well-honed dramatic style into ill-conceived song and poetry sequences. Musical numbers are capably performed by Elaine Joyner as Reva and backed by a stand-out jazz trio, but they’re superfluous. And the playwright’s forays into poetry, especially in a clunky soliloquy about the nature of love, delivered by Maxine, add little to the plot.
At the barracks the National Guardsmen play a highly uninteresting and dramatically implausible game of point/counterpoint in which each character, at one time or another, seems to argue both sides of an issue. The student characters can be summed up in a few words. There’s the Genius Hippie who plays guitar and calls everybody “uptight,” the Cynical Bookworm, the Princess, the Black Power Activist, and the Prototypical Feminist who says “right on” a lot.
