The Unmentionables
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The tempest in a designer teapot over the children cast in The Pain and the Itch tended to overshadow discussions of its merits–though eventually it did win a Jeff Award for best new play. Unlike Tony Kushner in his Old Testament-prophet mode, Norris seldom courts serious consideration. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve it. The Pain and the Itch and 2002’s Purple Heart are both terribly funny and relentlessly, unflinchingly ugly. The stranger who visits the grieving Vietnam war widow in Purple Heart isn’t a source of comfort or healing but another nail in the coffin of her sanity. In The Pain and the Itch, the disease that afflicts a family of self-absorbed, hypocritical liberals began with a brutal assault in an eastern European country, brought to light only by a banal extramarital affair.
But The Pain and the Itch is more drawing-room farce than social satire. Norris’s worldview, that people are essentially selfish and tend to behave badly in times of crisis, carries more weight in The Unmentionables, which hints at a rough-hewn George Bernard Shaw–it’s like Heartbreak House in postcolonial Africa. He’s finally willing to take all of us–his characters, the audience, and presumably himself–out of our comfort zone. This play about Americans living in equatorial West Africa focuses on people who either have misguided notions of African life or little interest in the world beyond their villa. But we’re spared long monologues explaining Western culpability in African genocides, and we’re spared twinkly-eyed natives who serve as beacons of folksy wisdom for the bourgeois abroad. Instead Norris simply dumps us into a world that’s familiar in its creature comforts but otherwise strange and utterly menacing so that, like the characters, we begin to fear whatever lies beyond the wire-topped walls.
When: Through 8/27: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM
