Imagine this: an American metropolitan area (let's call it Tampa Bay) with several major performing arts centers, a regional stage of real merit, and a smattering of other theaters. It's to these venues that people go when they want to have a mainstream theater experience, to see a Broadway touring company or a local version of an Off-Broadway hit. But then there's another place – little more than a hole-in-the-wall, really, hard to find, with a noisy air conditioner – and it's here the cognoscenti go to have their minds blown. Here the plays are produced that the other houses won't touch: shows so raw, so urgent, so dreadfully disturbing that most producers don't dare ask an audience to endure them. Still, this metropolis has everything, including lovers of difficult truths, and it's these explorers who know and cherish this diminutive playhouse. And every few weeks, these art-smitten stalwarts make their way to this site to see shows so penetrating, they leave stains on the psyche. Days later, you can still tell where these pathfinders have been: it's in their hollow, haunted eyes, their nervous, furtive grimaces. And it's also in their look – there's no denying it – of satisfaction.
Now, before I go further, I have to make a confession: I've been wanting to write the previous paragraph for seven years. Seven years ago, I first attended a play at Ybor City's Silver Meteor Gallery, and hardly had I walked into this distinctly unattractive space than I knew what I wanted: for brilliance to find a home there, for genius to be so domiciled. After all, wasn't it in such a space that Sam Shepard's earliest, most bizarre plays had their first New York productions, wasn't Waiting for Godot first produced at Paris' minuscule Théatre de Babylone? Every region, I reasoned, needed to have such a venue, and the Silver Meteor just had to be it for our Cities-By-The-Bay. Surely I'd have some of my most important theater experiences between these dusty walls.
But I didn't, not often. For seven years most of what I witnessed at the Silver Meteor was second-rate drama, no more interesting than the space in which it played. Yes, I saw a couple of memorable shows there – one or two by Jobsite Theater, another by Alley Cat Players. But the scathing, exhilarating experience I kept anticipating didn't take place. It seemed Silver Meteor would never live up to its potential.
But now that's all changed.
The name of the play is Bash, it's by Neil LaBute, and even without a set, with crude lighting, and over the din of the air conditioner, it's one of the most exciting, provocative shows I've seen in years. I very much suspect that I'll never forget it.
The play, presented by Hat Trick Theatre, is divided into three one-acts, united by theme and atmosphere. These are tales of cruelty, vindictiveness, intolerance. They're about the more frightening sides of the human mind and about ancient superstitions in modern guise. Two of the three plays are brilliant and profoundly disturbing. One other is less incisive but still worthy of reflection. All three depend, to some extent, on surprise – so I'll be careful not to say too much in what follows. But take my word for it: near the close of two of these short plays, something very unsettling takes place. Unsettling and unexpected – and distressingly resonant.
The most intense of the one-acts is the last, Medea Redux. This is the story of a 13-year-old girl who comes to believe that her junior high school teacher is trying to seduce her. At first it's just suspicion; then it becomes clear that his advances are deliberate, and finally there's sex. But even while these developments are taking place, the teacher is telling his young student about an ancient Greek view of the world as a machine out of joint, a dangerous contraption wherein humans are victimized precisely because of their mortality. These two different themes – the seduction and the world's accursedness – seem at first to have only a minor relevance to each other; but in the end everything becomes disastrously, harrowingly clear. The story is told as a monologue – the girl is in her late 20s now, and she's making a kind of confession – and thanks to actress April Bender, we receive a very clear picture of an impressionable but ultimately furious young female. This is the one-act that'll keep you up late at night.
One other is almost as powerful. Iphigenia in Orem is a monologue spoken by a man – played capably, with just the right degree of discomfort, by Steve Fisher – whose baby daughter years before died of suffocation in her parents' bed. Now he wants to discuss the horrifying accident – and this time, to tell the truth. His story isn't just about his wife and daughter, but also about the corporate world in which he struggles, and his resentment toward one colleague in particular, a woman with notably feminist tendencies. This deceptively quiet play is even more chilling if you remember the Iphigenia myth: that she, the daughter of Agamemnon, was sacrificed by her father in order that his fleet might make it to Troy. I'm often struck by how irrelevant most Greek myths are to our Judeo-Christian culture, but LaBute in this play wants to make a connection and shockingly succeeds. Carl Jung, among others, would certainly understand.
The middle of the three plays, A Gaggle of Saints, is the least revelatory. It's about gay-bashing in Manhattan, and depends for its effect on the seemingly harmless presence of college junior John, played by Harry Richards, and his girlfriend Sue, portrayed by Nikki Flinn. Richards seems miscast – too unathletic-looking, too inward – and though Flinn has her moments, her Connecticut debutante poses eventually become wearying. But the real problem here is a script that tells us nothing about anti-gay bigotry that we didn't already know (the suggestion that basher John has some gay tendencies of his own is little more than a cliché). Still, the scene has some raw power once the violence gets underway, and there are a meaningful few moments about a stolen ring and its history. Even LaBute's failures, it seems, can impress.
As for the production design: Anne Johennenson's set barely exists, while the costumes, uncredited, are not badly chosen. Still, it's hard for a production to look good in the Silver Meteor, and this one is no exception. As for Joe Winskye's direction, it's tiptop in the two monologues, poorly paced in A Gaggle of Saints.
And it doesn't matter: two out of three times LaBute's Bash is heart-rendingly successful: frightening, outrageous, appalling, extraordinary.
You can find it at the Silver Meteor.
Which, for a few weekends at least, has become one of the Bay area's essential spaces.
This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2005.
