WEAPON OF MASS IMPACT | A RED ORCHID THEATRE
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Playwright Brett Neveu takes a careful look at the world of unidentifiable and unquantifiable but ever-present menace in his new Weapon of Mass Impact, which revolves around three professional women who’ve been sent by their companies to a terrorism-preparedness program before going overseas. As in most Neveu plays, the dialogue in this one is indirect, even banal. Half the scenes are set in an upscale coffee shop, where the women meet in pairs to compare notes, as they’ve been instructed to do, on the suspicious-persons lists they’ve compiled while walking the streets. Mostly, though, they just get to know each other. Other, shorter scenes are set in a darkened room, where each woman in turn sits before two hooded, gun-toting interrogators who force her to confess to made-up crimes. When the drama is this submerged, skilled actors are required to tap into the undercurrent of contemporary anxiety and malaise, the subtext for everything the characters feel and do. And director Edward Sobel, staging his fourth Neveu play, has found performers who give urgency to nearly every moment of this satisfying Red Orchid world premiere.
Weapon of Mass Impact is the second play in Neveu’s trilogy about American jitters in the wake of 9/11. The first, Harmless, which opened at TimeLine last season, is about a writing professor and one of his students, an Iraq veteran, who may have confessed war crimes in a story he’s written. Harmless is Neveu’s most conventional script, basically a courtroom drama unfolding in the office of a college president. But with Weapon of Mass Impact he returns to a structure more typical for him, which on paper seems hardly a structure at all. Most of the play consists of the women sitting in the coffee shop engaged in idle chatter, the only “conflict” arising from the occasional insensitive remark that creates a socially awkward moment. But as Sobel’s spare, nearly motionless staging emphasizes, the women’s deliberate efforts to remain superficial barely mask the fears smothering them.
