If I see one more “couch play,” I’m going to scream. You know the couch play: It’s the one where there’s a couch center stage — slightly to the right or left, if the director’s feeling frisky — and the characters hold lengthy conversations while at least one of them is sitting on it.
It’s not that the couch play is bad per se. It’s often competently written, with compelling characters. It can be funny, and it can be sad. It can also be very entertaining. But the couch play is the worst enemy of American theater, because it’s basically live television. And we get the real thing for free at home.
This past week, I caught two uneven — to put it kindly — plays that were definitely not couch plays, and for that reason alone they deserve some attention. Also, they clearly were the result of obsessive minds, and I can’t even remember the last time a new American play was obviously the result of an all-consuming, “I don’t care what you think” obsession. (It’s hard to be unhinged when you’re trying to get an MFA or are getting a show through a workshop.)
The first was the Rattlestick’s production of José Rivera’s “Massacre (Sing to Your Children),” a hodge-podge of political allegory, horror, magical realism and psycho-sexual confessional. The second was Culture Project’s production of Tennessee Williams’ “In Masks Outrageous and Austere,” an overheated compendium of that playwright’s themes and stock characters staged as if we were at Xenon in the early ’80s.
Those plays have plenty of problems. “Massacre” would pack more of a punch at half the length (it’s two and a half hours long), and the staging can be strangely conservative at odd moments (as I said in my review, why does everybody wash with their underwear on?). But the shock tactics are very efficient, and they reminded me that being scared at the theater is fantastic, and it doesn’t happen nearly enough. The point Rivera is trying to make is hazy, but it almost doesn’t matter because at its best, “Massacre” provokes primal fears.
As for “Masks,” it’s the last full-length play Williams completed, though I gather there’s some argument as to whether it’s actually finished. I’m not sure it can ever be, so there it is in all its wobbly, messed up and most definitely cray-cray splendor. Several times during the show, my friend and I glanced at each other in disbelief, which is the only response to lines like “He comes out of a gangbang, in which he was the sole object, with a satisfied grin and gum-drops — big cellophane sack of. That is innocence for you.”
“One must have a distinguishing eccentricity these days,” Mrs. Gorse-Bracken (Alison Fraser) tells Babe Foxworth, the rich lady played by Shirley Knight. “Of course, not everyone is blessed like you with a multitude of distinguishing eccentricities.”
“Masks” and “Massacre” aren’t great plays or productions by any stretch of the imagination, but at least they harbor a multitude of eccentricities.