Ajax goes AWOL

Brent Harris and Mesafint Goldfeld in Ajax.

The news isn't good from the A.R.T.'s production of Sophocles's Ajax (now through March 13), but at least the news isn't irritating. The production doesn't work, but it also doesn't feel like a fraud the way The Blue Flower and most of Diane Paulus's work has. Ajax feels basically like an old A.R.T. show - indeed, Robert Brustein and Jeremy Geidt are even in it, as part of a video chorus - but, like the vast majority of old A.R.T. shows, it's kind of a pseudo-intellectual bore.  But this time the boredom feels somehow comforting; it's almost like a nostalgia trip.

It's true that director Sarah Benson (of Soho Rep fame) has some interesting ideas about the play - or at least they're interesting on paper; they don't gel on stage, for complex reasons.  Not all the performances are strong (although a few are), and Ms. Benson strikes such a distant stance toward the material that the modern resonances she seems to be looking for (she has updated the action to Afghanistan or Iraq) never actually come clear.  Is Athena supposed to be Condi Rice?  Is that Obama as Odysseus? We wonder such things vaguely at times, but mostly we're thinking, Do I care?

And mostly no, you do not care - although sometimes you do.   Brent Harris looks and sounds great as the gonzo Ajax, for instance (above), and brings a welcome jolt of whiteboy-freakout to every scene he's in.  Still, he doesn't convey Ajax's actual arc - because he, and the production, seem to want to half-pretend Ajax is falling apart because of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Unfortunately, that's not what Sophocles is saying; Sophocles is saying that Ajax is a professional killer who has finally gone off his leash ( he attempts to murder Odysseus and the other generals, but due to a delusion brought on by Athena, only succeeds in torturing some livestock).

What society owes such a killer for services rendered is the fundamental question of the play.  And when Benson and Co. finally get around to it, the production finds something like its footing, thanks to a passionate turn by Nathan Darrow as Teucer, the sole defender of the once-glorious, but now suicidal Ajax, and some solid work from James Joseph O'Neil as Menelaus and (believe it or not) Thomas Derrah as Agamemnon.  But up till then the production is consistently undermined by weaker work from Linda Powell (daughter of Colin Powell) as Ajax's captive consort, Tecmessa, and Ron Cephas Jones as a strangely blank Odysseus.

Ajax and his chorus line.

We can sense some of these acting problems are due to a certain absence on the part of the director - she's clearly not quite sure what to make of the matter-of-fact machismo of the play.  But alas, some of the show's conceptual problems are due to her presence.  Benson has decided to place the Chorus of the tragedy up on video screens (kind of like the title sequence for The Brady Bunch) with almost all the lines Sophocles wrote for them given over to Remo Airaldi (who's physically onstage, above).  With most of its actual dialogue missing, the Chorus instead mostly ad-libs lines like, "Whoa, too bad about Ajax going postal, dude."  The results are both banal and weirdly disconnected from the action (perhaps that's the point, but it doesn't work dramatically).  And it's amusing to ponder the number of well-known Harvard profs and hangers-on chosen for this "Chorus" - I guess this is the A.R.T.'s idea of "the common people."  Like the rest of the production, it feels out of touch with reality.

Visualize this

Papa, can you hear me?  (Guess not.)

I had the strangest feeling at My Name is Asher Lev (left, at the Lyric Stage through March 12); as both a lapsed Catholic and an admirer of Judaism, I felt I was being insulted at one remove- twice. Let me explain: Asher Lev - drawn from Rabbi Chaim Potok's novel of the same name - treats the world of the Hasidim, the mystical, revivalist branch of Orthodox Judaism. In the book (which I haven't read), it seems Potok explores the conflict between Hasidic precepts and the world of art - young Asher is portrayed as a brilliant artist, an idealist whose obsession with the visual flies in the face of his spiritual tradition (which has long viewed all artistic representation as a form of the "graven images" forbidden by "HaShem").

So far, so good; I'm all for critique of everything, including Judaism; and obviously I'm greatly concerned with the visual arts.  And at first glance, you might imagine that My Name is Asher Lev engages with the flowering of Jewish art that occurred with the triumph of modernism.  Indeed, Jews are all but absent from the Western artistic tradition until the twentieth century (the only one I can think of offhand from the earlier century is Camille Pissarro - and nobody comes to mind before him).

Once modernism - a sensibility largely forged in a Jewish salon in Paris - had established itself as a cultural force, Jewish artists began to make themselves known.  And tellingly, the more abstract modern art became, the more Jews dominated the scene - indeed, almost every major follower of abstract expressionism (which flowered during the period of Asher Lev) was Jewish: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston and Morris Louis were all Jewish, as were later artists Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Julian Schnabel - the list goes on and on.  Surprisingly, however, Jews dominated figurative art of the period as well, at least in pop form: Jerome Siegel and Joe Schuster, the creators of Superman, were Jewish, as was Bob Kane (creator of Batman), and both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, et. al.); American comics are essentially a Jewish tradition.

So a huge cultural shift occurred in Judaism in the twentieth century - one which, it's safe to assume, the Orthodox opposed (and perhaps still do).  But if you're looking for a sensitive treatment of the tensions between Reform Judaism and its more conservative (and perhaps anti-sensualist) brethren, look elsewhere than My Name is Asher Lev.  For Aaron Posner's dramatization strips all historical and religious context from the novel's central conflict.  I have to imagine Potok was more sensitive in this regard - even though in the end, Asher Lev becomes obsessed with painting not just naked ladies (a constant trope of middlebrow theatre!) but crucifixions.  That's right, for some reason this young Hasid feels it's his calling to revitalize a Catholic artistic tradition - even though Catholics were a central force in the attempted genocide of his people just a few years before.  And why? Because, Asher sputters, the crucifixion is the greatest image of suffering he can think of.

Hmmm.  Now it seems to me a few scenes from Auschwitz or Treblinka could give even the Grünewald Altarpiece a run for its money.  But what do I know, I'm just a goy.  Maybe the Jews don't really know from suffering!  Yet when the play climaxed with young Asher painting his mother dying on the cross, I had to wince just about every which way it's possible to wince - I was insulted for both the Jews and the Catholics, as well as for poor old Mama!

Okay, I know this very silly adaptation of Chaim Potok's novel means no harm; it's merely meant to operate in a kind of TV-movie-of-the-week mode, like Herman Wouk's The Winds of War, in which real history and real spirituality (and real art) don't really exist. Hence, perhaps, the utter seriousness with which it's being presented; director Scott Edmiston approaches it on his knees (which only makes this overrated director look more superficial than ever), and actors Joel Colodner, Anne Gottlieb, and Jason Schuchman give it their all. Indeed, whenever Colodner's onstage, his passion almost makes you believe in this schmaltz. (Almost.)  Janie E. Howland's set - seemingly a chunk of Brandeis has landed in the Lyric - is likewise superb, and Karen Perlow's reverent lighting leans heavily on candles flickering in shadow. Sometimes, watching all this serious professionalism devoted to such hokum, I felt myself about to cry out, "Yes, yes! Papa, please - can't you see cute Jewish boys should be free to paint crucifixions?" But then inwardly I'd find myself snickering. I mean, Jesus Christ. Or do I mean oy vey?

Stephen Thorne and Angela Brazil in The Crucible.

These days it seems it's Miller time on American stages. That's Arthur Miller I'm talking about, the once-celebrated writer of Death of a Salesman, All Our Sons, and other earnest contemplations of American politics, money and immorality. Our new playwrights studiously avoid that kind of thing, of course, so - how to put this - they're not much use in the current political environment.

But Miller's sturdy melodramas (okay, maybe they're tragedies, I certainly don't mind if you call them that!) once again seem startlingly apropos, and are popping up in theatres across the country. Because guess what - the corruption of the Iraq War wasn't all that different from the seamier side of World War II (All My Sons).  And every day the greedy, self-absorbed boomer generation looks more and more like Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman).

And then there's The Crucible (now at Trinity Rep through March 13), Miller's lengthy contemplation of the Salem witch trials.  Once thought a metaphor for the McCarthy "witch hunts," (and specifically, a critique of Elia Kazan's famous naming of names to HUAC), it now resonates with parallels to the mob mentality of the Tea Party and Fox News.

Trinity doesn't press this angle, however (although a few bleached-blonde news anchors breathlessly reporting the latest from Salem might have been fun).  Instead director Brian McEleney (who after Twelfth Night and Absurd Person Singular has begun to look like Trinity's most reliable director, and perhaps its next artistic director) allows us to draw our own parallels with the present day, even if it's very present in Eugene Lee's ingenious set, which fills the Chace Theater with a huge blow-up of Providence City Hall.  Before this suggestive backdrop, on bare wooden platforms, McEleney offers a bare-bones take on Miller's script - which, as you'd expect, highlights both its strengths and weaknesses.


For while The Crucible may have become a high-school classic, it's not quite in the same league as All My Sons or Death of a Salesman.  It's longer and preachier than either of those, and Miller can't help but insinuate a 50's-era sexual soap opera (between John Proctor and Abigail Williams) into proceedings that might have been more gripping if they had simply hewed closely to the frighteningly inexplicable historical record.  To me, the Salem witch trials are terrifying because they're not melodramatic; they depend, instead, on the cold, calculated malice of the childish and the religious - aided and abetted by the machinations of those who saw in their cobbled-together kangaroo courts a way to attack, or even exterminate, their personal enemies.

As long as Miller keeps these facts in his sights, however, The Crucible is gripping - in fact it's certainly the most gripping script I've seen this season, and for the usual reasons - the stakes are high, the characters compelling, the writing clean and clear.  And the Trinity actors manage well across the many roles most of them have to play (the cast is huge).  Still, only perhaps Angela Brazil (as Elizabeth Proctor) is working close to the top of her form.  Stephen Thorne makes a sympathetic, but slightly flat, John Proctor, and newcomer Olivia D'Ambrosio sometimes hyperventilates as Abigail Williams.  Indeed, many in the cast tend to get a bit shouty - Fred Sullivan, Jr., could work more subtlety into his bullying Deputy Governor Danforth, and the usually dependable Rachael Warren I think could make Mary Warren a bit more of a mouse.  Better are Mauro Hantman, as the slowly disillusioned John Hale, and Terrell Donnell Sledge, who gives an eloquent simplicity to Giles Corey, the man who was pressed to death rather than confess.

Still, even if imperfect, this Crucible struck me as a kind of tonic after much of the pseudo-political theatre I've endured recently.  It's certainly stronger than anything on the boards in Boston proper right now, and I urge you to make the trek to Providence to catch it while you can.

The Great Recapitulation

Hardman and Grant in Cymbeline.

Once you get to be my age, with decades of watching and pondering Shakespeare behind you, the whole canon can begin to seem like one very long play. And when I consider Cymbeline, I sometimes think the Bard himself might have begun to feel the same way.

For Cymbeline, written late in Shakespeare's career, is a strange enormity, and one that all but cries out for explanation. It's one of Shakespeare's longest plays, and certainly his most variegated - whenever I think of it, I'm reminded of Polonius's hilarious description of the players in Hamlet, who specialize in "tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited."

Cymbeline, I suppose, counts as "tragical-comical-historical pastoral" (unless it's "poem unlimited"). At bottom, it's a national foundation myth - it concerns a legendary war that separated Britain from Rome. But literally a dozen different plots and modes flower briefly within that frame - the play opens with an unequal marriage that seems a variant of the one in All's Well that Ends Well, but it soon morphs into a miniature Othello (with a villain named "Iachimo," or "Little Iago"), before transmuting itself into something akin to As You Like It, with a subplot borrowed from Romeo and Juliet. And this is before we even get to the tropes lifted from Twelfth Night, Comedy of Errors, and King Lear. It's hard, actually, to think of a play by Shakespeare that doesn't have an echo in Cymbeline (maybe Henry VI), which is why I sometimes call it "The Great Recapitulation."

But why a recapitulation at that stage of Shakespeare's career? Well, Cymbeline does stand at a key juncture in the canon - after the great tragedies, and the "problem plays," and just after the odd patchwork that is Pericles - the latter half of which is almost certainly by the Bard, the first half of which is almost certainly by somebody else. But that latter half - in which a daughter is restored to her father, and a family re-united - would prove the inspiration for Shakespeare's final period, the "romances," with their uniquely haunting combination of tragedy and comedy. The greatest of these, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, take two opposed tacks to the structural problem of a tragi-comic synthesis. Cymbeline, by way of contrast, is something of a pile-up; watching it, it's tempting to guess that, armed with a new motif that he felt could serve as the culmination of his life's work, Shakespeare's first impulse was to stitch it into a vast recapitulation of his entire oeuvre. In a way, with Cymbeline the Bard took a very, very deep breath before saying, "And now for something completely different."


The results are, I admit, sometimes somewhat bizarre. Cymbeline shape-shifts at will, and though there's a central character - Imogen - who ranks among Shakespeare's finest, almost everyone else feels like a minor variant of some other, earlier personage, and poor Imogen's adventures grow almost maddeningly convoluted and extravagant (Headless corpses! Roman invasions! Visits from Jupiter!). Still, I have seen Cymbeline work - and work superbly; but only once, and only when enormous resources, and brilliant talent, were thrown at it (in the great Robin Phillips's masterful production at Stratford in the mid-80's).

But the Actors' Shakespeare Project, which is presenting this enormity just through this weekend as part of its Winter Festival, is producing it behind a storefront in Davis Square, with only seven actors seemingly attired for yoga, and only an oriental rug for a set, and without even proper theatrical lighting (but with a background soundtrack of bass guitar pumped in from the bar next door). I'd like to report that somehow a miracle has taken place, and that against all odds ASP has produced a brilliant sketch of this epic text. But I'm afraid any reduction of Cymbeline would be impossible; its gnarly sprawl is central to it; you can't "sketch" it.

What we get instead is a kind of delicate burlesque of the play by a small troupe of funny, talented players - which works, off and on, particularly if you know the script already and are in a forgiving mood. If you don't, or are not, the whole thing may strike you as inexplicable. I'm an acquaintance of the director, Doug Lockwood, and he's a smart and funny guy - and an inspired Shakespearean clown. So I wasn't surprised to find a light, clowning mood assert itself - the villains were prissy or over-the-top, and we never thought for a moment that things might turn out badly for sweet, innocent Imogen. This isn't right for the play - the chief thematic feature of which is the slow emergence of love and order from Lear-like cruelty and chaos. But if you don't have the resources to do the play - well, it's better than nothing; and it seemed to me that for much of the time the audience was cajoled into a mood of slightly confused amusement.

As Imogen, Brooke Hardman was always energetic and appealing, but far too sturdy and modern for a fairy-tale heroine whose delicacy we should feel is often about to crack beneath the weight of the horrors she must endure.  But then miscasting is all but ASP's signature, isn't it - talented actors playing against type could almost be described as the troupe's artistic statement, its raison d'être.  Thus we watched as Marya Lowry did what she could (i.e., caricature) the play's evil queen, while the talented De'Lon Grant, though plausible as Imogen's hubby, made her cloddish suitor (and son to said evil queen) Cloten a bitchy hoot rather than any kind of crude threat (we felt throughout that Hardman's Imogen could take down mother and son in two seconds flat if she felt like it).  Meanwhile Neil McGarry seemed a bit lost as Iachimo (is petty malice so hard to play?), but Ken Baltin was a better Cymbeline than most, and a quite funny Philario.  Rounding out the (mis-) cast were two of Boston's best young rising stars, Danny Bryck and Risher Reddick, who did yeoman duty in a bevy of roles that didn't suit them at all (at one point they were even supposed to be twins!). The single intriguing feature of the miscasting was Lowry's turn as the cross-gendered "Belaria" - Lowry turned this Kent-like figure into a haunting version of the powerful, noble mother who always seems to be missing from Shakespeare.

And I have to admit that a good deal of the cast's antics charmed, even if they were consistently off-kilter. I don't know why Doug Lockwood wanted to take on Cymbeline, but he got through it in a way. (With the help of heavy cutting, I might add; he skipped Jupiter's appearance entirely, and did we hear "Hark, hark, the lark"? Maybe I couldn't hear it over the bass from next door.) The curious may find some fun in this production; others may find it cute, but feel that it leaves you clueless.

It's St. Valentine's Day, and so thoughts turn inevitably to whom - and what - we love.

And one of the things I love is theatre - but I have to admit, the poor old thing's been having a rough time of it lately. Some would even argue she's on her last legs; luckily, however, everybody's got a remedy for her. If she'd only drink this elixir, or drop that habit, she'd be back to her old self in no time.

To be honest, just last fall Boston theatre seemed, indeed, to be hale and hearty; in October we even seemed to be enjoying a golden age of sorts. But lately the news has not been so good - perhaps it's just the cycles of the moon, or El Niño or something, but I've sat through one weak play after another for what seems like weeks. Oddly, performances and production values have remained strong - it's the actual plays themselves - the new plays, the supposed engine of the whole enterprise - that seem to be conking out.

I know many playwrights reply to this kind of claim with the counter-claim that no, it's the critics who are conking out, that we "hate" theatre, or are out to stifle innovation, or are racists or I don't know, whatevah (you can check Parabasis for the latest revision of this meme!).  I only wish these people could spend an hour or two at one of the contentious meetings of the IRNE committee, in which critics go head-to-head for the shows they believe in and care about.  Such fracases are hard to square with the vision of reviewers as hostile to theatre, trust me.  Indeed, you leave such meetings convinced that critics actually care too much, that we're the last constituency that really and truly loves the theatre in and of itself.

So it strikes me that it will not be the critics who undo the theatre - instead, it may be all the other people who insist they love the form who actually may be loving it to death.  At any rate, it seems most observers already feel reviewers are tangential to the whole declining enterprise.  One need look no further than the ongoing imbroglios over Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark - critics finally descended on the production after weeks (and weeks) of previews, and rendered a devastating verdict.  But most of the commentary on the web has centered on the ethics of reviewing a "preview" (even when it's not, obviously, really a preview), or has questioned whether even the combined forces of the entire New York press can stop Julie Taymor and Bono's juggernaut.

This of course, boils down to the question: "Does it matter if it's bad?"  I, of course, feel it does matter if it's bad - and although I've only met a few people who've seen Spider-Man, they've all agreed it's really bad.  Virtually all the reviews said it was bad; the Times claimed it was one of the worst musicals ever.  It's bad.

Yet many people still seem to think it should be a success of sorts.  It doesn't matter to them that it's bad - the aligned forces of pop and finance have created a "phenomenon," and therefore it should be allowed to go on, regardless of its quality.  They're of a kin with the people who feel we should see less of the classics, and cut back on Shakespeare - they essentially ask the question, "Does it matter if they're good?", which is really only an inversion of the query, "Does it matter if it's bad?"

I'm not sure, however, how long a cultural enterprise can go on when everyone knows deep down inside that it's bad.  The writers who boo the classics and insist that new writers be heard whether or not they're any good strike me as quite a bit like those financiers who pushed junk mortgages on the public not so long ago - the lack of quality of those financial instruments didn't matter then, either, because the market would "always" go up.  Just as theatre can "always" survive whatever we throw at it.

Well, count me out of that whole boondoggle - and count me in as a regulator of sorts.  I may not be able to triumph over the current theatrical administration, but at least I'll go down trying.

Because I really do want to save the thing I love.

Foxy lady

Vixen Sharp-Ears and her brood. Photo by J.J. Bates.

I'm always torn over productions like Boston Opera Collaborative's The Cunning Little Vixen (at left, through Sunday at Mass. College of Art). On the one hand, Leoš Janáček's opera is a wonderful one, and surprisingly, many of its deepest themes come clear in the BOC version. On the other hand, I have to admit the singing is adequate but uneven, and so is the orchestral playing.

So you have to go in appreciating the constraints of an ambitious, but still basically volunteer, organization like  Boston Opera Collaborative.  When a company's reach exceeds its grasp, I feel I have to say so.  But - and this is rather a big "but" - I can't pretend I didn't enjoy The Cunning Little Vixen.  Those who know the opera (as well as those who don't) will appreciate that its spirit is captured eloquently here, despite the variable technique of some of its performers.

The Cunning Little Vixen may be the only great opera adapted from a comic strip - but either comic strips used to be a whole lot more profound than they are now, or Janáček worked a miracle with his source.  For while Vixen certainly plays well as a whimsical piece for children, it's also a haunting meditation on mortality for adults.  Indeed, for the great Janáček, who was seventy-something when he wrote the score, the adventures of "Sharp-Ears," as she's known in the original strip, clearly formed the basis for a fond farewell to the joys of romance and youth (and maybe life itself).

That strange yin-yang of youth and age floating in the opera's atmosphere makes it unforgettable (and the hummable melodies that Janáček penned for Sharp-Ears don't hurt, either).  The surprise is that stage director Roxanna Myhrum captures nearly perfectly this rueful mix.  She's helped immensely by witty costumes and puppets provided by costume designers Deirdre McCabe Gerrard and Lauren Sack, and scenic designer Olivia Brownlee.  And while Myhrum's cast is variable, she has solid sopranos in her leads, Erin M. Smith and Natalie Polito - and Ms. Smith, it turns out, is  also a stylish actress.  There were other good acting turns in the company - I was amused by Daniel Schwartz's Badger, for instance - but fewer outstanding vocal performances.  To be fair, however, the Tower Auditorium at Mass. College of Art is a hideous place to sing, and the performers had to project over an orchestra playing without a pit.  Meanwhile the dance numbers (yes, there's dancing too!), choreographed by Gabrielle Orcha, were sweetly performed but a little repetitive.

Down in that non-pit, music director LidiyaYankovskaya did give a good account of the score (and the orchestral reduction she was working from is a lovely one), but the playing didn't always cohere - as is often the case with volunteer orchestras, she had a solid string section,  but more variable winds and brass.  Such gaps may ruin the experience for operatic elitists, but for other fans, a chance to see a solid version of this charmer may outweigh those concerns.  And certainly this production serves well as an introduction to the form for children - even its bittersweet ending (warning: poor Sharp-Ears meets an untimely end) will give them a hint that, you know, things don't always turn out that well at the opera.

End of the line

Are we dead yet?  The cast of Terminus.

You keep thinking it has to be a joke.

You think that when the heroine pops out the eyeballs of the crazed lesbian abortionist who's brandishing a sharpened spear.  And you think it when she wakes up (after having been knocked out cold with a folding chair) to find a guy masturbating over her, ready to shoot.  You think it when the other leading lady reaches orgasm with a flying demon made of worms.  And you really, really think it when the serial killer is strung up by his intestines (which have been pulled out through his arsehole), and swings face-down from a construction crane, singing (I'm not kidding) "The Wind Beneath My Wings."

But it seems it's not a joke.  Indeed, it's deadly serious (even though the audience every now and then breaks out into guffaws).  "It" is Terminus, a new play by Mark O'Rowe, in a touring production by Dublin's Abbey Theatre, now at the Paramount as part of ArtsEmerson's Irish Festival.

And what I can say but - either you want to stay very far away - or you don't want to miss it.

The title alone tells you that Terminus is about the ultimate, the finale, the end of line.  And the play certainly stands as the ne plus ultra of pretentious bad taste.  It's a braided trio of monologues about horror and death, and hell and more horror and death, and more horror and death and hell.  Did I mention mental suffering and abject squalor and physical torment?  Maybe I did already.

And what's more, Terminus is also a rap.  Yes, hipsters - Irish rap!!!  Okay, it doesn't have an actual beat, but playwright O'Rowe is constantly bustin' rhymes of the "Christ/shite" and "fuck/truck" variety during his lurid descriptions of urinating lesbians and grotesquely deformed fetuses (since he keeps no steady rhythm going, however, this is pretty easy).  Yes - imagine the love child of Harlan Ellison and Dean Koontz working with Dr. Dre, and you've got Terminus.

Inevitably, you also find yourself thinking, "This actually could be great if it were made into a midnight movie, and people could throw rubber eyeballs at the screen."  Oddly enough, it's also so pretentious that it might work as an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.  On rollerblades.  Could somebody please forward the script to Sir Andrew?

Although I know what you're thinking - Jesus H. Christ, Garvey, can't you tell you're inside a living graphic novel?  (Yes, I can.)  And that the playwright is simply pushing said form's adolescent tropes to their logical, if extreme, conclusion?  (Again, ditto, yup, I get it.)  Only the thing is - I'll just leave all that bull to the pop critics, if you don't mind.  I've got real novels to read and real art to review.  I don't have time to watch Junior doodle cartoons of worms eating corpses all day.

Because as "drama" - oh, God, where to begin with Terminus?  I mean,  please - it's so dull. Its Twilight-Zone-level irony never varies, and its droning tone never wavers; you could literally doze off to its background Vault-of-Horror hum (and one or two people around me did just that).   I knew from the Abbey's tour of Playboy of the Western World a few years ago that this troupe was a bit over-rated, but I had no idea they were such self-serious dorks.  You keep waiting for some slightly arch phrasing, some flicker of an eyebrow, to nudge the whole thing into the hilarious parody of current pop culture it's screaming out to be.  But no such luck; the stark lighting, the smashed set, the grim, downer line readings - they're taking this thing (and themselves) very, very seriously.  And so I just don't want to acknowledge the director or designers or even the actors - they may be taking themselves seriously, but that doesn't mean I have to.

And you don't have to, either.  Of course it would be rude to actually throw rubber eyeballs at the stage, but you can still do that mentally.  And to be honest, theatre geeks may not want to miss this show; it has the aura of legend about it, as Carrie and Moose Murders did.  People may be bragging that they saw it for years to come.

On the other hand, you'll never get these two hours of your life back.

So think carefully before you decide.