Blasted

The truth is, I’m not easily shocked. At least not in terms of what’s on the stage or screen. I may be disturbed by something; that’s different. I’m an emotional guy, full of empathy and compassion, so it is possible to move me. And that’s what I found with Defunkt Theatre’s production of Sarah Kane’s first pivotal play, Blasted: I was moved, but I wasn’t shocked.

Not that it’s important to be. It’s just that I read a lot of material about the play before seeing it, and I also was familiar with Kane’s pitch black dramatic suicide note, 4.48 Psychosis, which Defunkt staged a few years ago, all leading me to think I was going to get a real gut punch, which did not exactly happen for me. Maybe it’s because of my own dark imagination, or things I’ve already produced myself (Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class and Prince Gomovilas’ adaptation of Scott Heim’s novel, Mysterious Skin, both feature the same kind of dark and gritty realism as Kane’s play). And yet, even though I was completely prepared for everything I saw, it was nonetheless a very powerful show.

What I don’t want to do here is reveal much of what happens in the story, because I think that’s what nearly spoiled it for me. The reviews told me everything that happens, as if they thought audiences needed a very detailed and specific warning. This was a real disservice. Suffice to say, it isn’t for the faint of heart. But that’s all. Let me let you discover it for yourself.

However, here’s some non-spoiler stuff about the plot:  Basically, a man and a woman who have a history together but are not particularly simpatico, get a hotel room for the night. They quarrel over a number of issues, mainly sex and the man’s raving bigotry and paranoia. The man is dying, and the woman seems to have a disorder that involves fits of laughter, followed by fainting. There is some abuse that takes place. And yet, the man (he has a name—Ian—and he’s played by a very capable and committed Matt Smith) is more pathetic than villainous. He suffers painfully in the face of the ticking clock of his mortality. It seems like he’s trying to do more than satisfy his various cravings (gin, cigarettes, food and sex); there’s a sense that he wants to preserve his dignity, and yet his lusts seem to thwart this effort every time. The woman (Cate, played by Elizabeth Parker as both childlike and full of mystery), for her part, waffles back and forth from genuine affection and interest for Ian, to disgust and contempt.

And then something unexpected happens. Suddenly we find out we’re in a war zone, and the hotel room become like its own corner of hell, and the crazy soldier who shows up unannounced proves, in his demonic cruelty, to fit right in.

That’s all the story I’m going to share. This production makes maximum use of excellent lighting and sound designs (by Cassie Skauge and Gordon Romei, respectively) to create the feeling of menace that permeates the proceedings. During the blackouts, it’s really black. You can’t see a thing. But you hear this most ominous sounding rainfall, like it’s nails pouring out of the sky, instead of water. And when the lights come back up (after not too long, I might add), the stage is dramatically changed, and you really do wonder how did they do that?

As usual, I sat in the front row, and everything felt so much more real and palpable than you necessarily want it to in a show like this. I got Ian’s bare ass staring at me just a couple feet away. When I heard him coughing and wheezing from his terminal condition, I actually wanted to move to the back of the theatre because I felt worried I might catch something, even though the rational part of my brain knew this was just a sick character. I actually don’t recommend sitting in the front row, but rather up some levels because the risers still allow for good sightlines, and my view of certain key moments was blocked because I had a big center-stage bed in front of me.

On an entirely personal note, part of my trepidation in seeing this play has to do with knowing the story of playwright Sarah Kane, who was brought up in a devout Christian household, only to abandon her faith later in life. As a Christian man, it makes sense to me that a loss of faith would be followed by spiraling despair. She attributed the violent content of Blasted, in part, to the violence of the Bible, and while I whole-heartedly admit that the Bible has a great deal of brutality in its pages, I could not really see the connection between the violence found in the scriptures, and the events unfolding in this play.

But back to the pertinent discussion of this play. Bottom line:  Defunkt Theatre has taken a very challenging work and has run with it, fully committed, nothing halfway, no holds barred, complete honesty and integrity in every aspect of the production. But this is their MO; this is what they do. This is why they’ve become a nationally renowned theatre company, known for its boldness and powerful work. If they can take a play like this, which is about as rife with challenges and obstacles as you can get, and do it so expertly, one wonders if they can do wrong at all.