Benefactors
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Well, you know what comes next, don’t you? Swamped by physical and bureaucratic difficulties, David throws off hunks of idealism like so much ballast. His plans progress from 6 stories to 11 to 18, until he finds himself calling for a pair of–yes–towers 50 stories high. The year being 1968, he can expect a protest. What he’s not at all prepared for is the fact that the leader of the protest is his old school chum and neighbor, Colin Molyneux–the same snide Colin who’s spent so many evenings sponging dinner off David and his wife, Jane; the same Colin whose own helpless wife, Sheila, has begun to blossom as David’s office assistant.
The great thing about Michael Frayn’s 1984 play, Benefactors, is how it takes David’s tale and teases it out in a million directions without ever letting it lose its snap. On one level this is the (remarkably novelistic) story of a devastating series of professional and domestic betrayals. On another it’s an allegory of Empire, with David representing a Western-style imperialism perpetually ready to help the less fortunate by helping them out of their land, resources, and independence. On still another, it’s a satire of the archetypal Great Man destroyed by the cult of pragmatism. Given our experience with urban renewal projects from Cabrini-Green to Maxwell Street, Chicagoans might be inclined to see it as a parable about the folly of bureaucracy. It might even be interpreted as a meditation on the problem of what happens to ostensibly liberal values when faced with a focused and relentless evil, such as Hitler in 1938 or Osama bin Laden in 2001.
