Bash
at the Conservatory
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When I saw “Bash” last fall, I left disdaining the play as a symptom rather than a critique of moral decay. In that production, “Bash” seemed an intellectual exercise, a clever little nihilistic machine spiced with violence. The one-act Iphigenia in Orem was just a contemporary version of Euripides’ classic, in which Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter to appease the gods, and Medea Redux just a recasting of another Euripides play, about a woman who takes vengeance on her husband by killing their children. Too often a writer retelling an old tale just wants to show off his knowledge.
It wasn’t until I saw the four virtuoso performances in Jeffrey Cass’s staging of “Bash” for Circle Theatre that I realized LaBute was attacking the obvious but widespread fallacy that appearances are everything. The college couple in A Gaggle of Saints–a sweet, oblivious Laura Bush type, Sue, and John, the sexually ambivalent frat rat who incites a gay bashing–are to all appearances perfect. At least that’s how Candace Thompson and Hunter Stiebel play them in the Circle Theatre production. Thompson is attractive, upbeat, and mindless, and Stiebel is similarly positive and good-looking, even a little pretty. Every production I’ve seen of this play acknowledges the girl’s moral blindness and the boy’s homoerotic feelings. What Circle Theatre communicates, and other productions haven’t, is that for all their moral culpability these two remain gorgeous and appealing.
