American Dead
Neveu’s material is well suited to the socially conscious, militantly intimate sort of drama that Chayevsky and an infant television technology favored. Set in a small midwestern town that’s getting smaller by the day as people drift away, businesses close down, and buildings go to seed, the play centers on a broken soul named Lewie. A former housepainter, Lewie was probably always an amiably marginal kind of guy; he lost whatever equilibrium he had, however, when his sister, Grace, and a young clerk named Mark were gunned down during a robbery at the local grocery store. Now Lewie does odd jobs, drinks too much beer, and spends his nights roaming the literal ruins of his past–his bulldozed family home, the empty hulk of his high school–as he communes with the ghosts of the two victims.
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But in the end it’s James Leaming’s show. Leaming’s Lewie is astounding in its portrayal of a handyman, as doomed as Oedipus. His slow, certain subsidence is heartbreaking–not least of all because Leaming is able to enrich it with tokens of the amiably marginal guy Lewie would’ve been quite happy to be if everything else hadn’t happened instead.
