4 Murders
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The usual setting of Neveu’s plays is an American small town, like the one drying up in last spring’s American Dead or the one inhabited by crystal-meth addicts in The Go or the one scarred by a school shooting in Eric LaRue (his strongest play, also originally produced by A Red Orchid Theatre). 4 Murders has the poignancy and beguiling dark charm of these earlier works, but it lacks the indelible sense of despair that accumulates in Eric LaRue and American Dead.
Echoing the two-act, four-scene structure he used so effectively in Eric LaRue, Neveu here makes each scene–devoted to the interaction between the killer and one victim–its own short play. The killers’ targets are a neurotic freelance writer, a talkative executive working late at the office (a scene that feels a bit like a palimpsest of Albee’s The Zoo Story), a pissed-off factory worker coming off the third shift, and a man staying by himself in a down-at-heels hotel. The perpetrator–who might be named Joel Nepples–is a nebbishy, chameleonic middle-aged fellow. In Lawrence MacGowan’s eerily calm performance, his demeanor never changes–just his cover story as he wins the confidence of his victims, who all seem to be in desperate need of a sounding board. In one case Joel pretends he’s a longtime resident of a changing neighborhood and reassures the shut-in writer that they’re living in a good place. In another he’s a fast-food deliveryman who, mysteriously, has time to sit and chat a while with the exec. Each vignette runs the risk of devolving into a stereotypical depiction of urban isolation and loneliness yet is saved by Neveu’s dialogue, crystalline and elliptical at once, revealing the links between the victims.
When: Through 6/5: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Andy Rothenberg.
