THE CONNECTION
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These “real junkies” forget their lines, deliver long, digressive harangues, or simply slump off their chairs at inopportune times. “I can’t tell the performance from the rehearsal,” one of them mumbles. Naturally these lapses drive the author to distraction, and more than once he interrupts the play with lines like “You are murdering the play. . . . So far not one of you has carried out this dramatic assignment.”
In its time, 1959, The Connection was something of a notorious cult hit, in part, I’m sure, because America was considerably less acquainted with the lower depths of the drug world. What a shiver must have run through the audience the first time a character shot up onstage.
Here, however, Cotovsky has been given a cast far more polished and sure of themselves than any cast I’ve seen at the Mary-Arrchie since Cotovsky’s excellent production of Pinter’s The Birthday Party several years ago. Guy Van Swearingen turns in a terrific performance as the pale, sweaty junkie Leach, a man so far gone in his addiction that safe doses of the drug have no effect on him. And Lawrence Woshner is quite convincing as the slick dealer Cowboy.
