Mine may be a minority view. Clearly the many regional theaters that have staged the play, to say nothing of the London judges who gave it the 2007 Olivier Award for best new play (over "Frost/Nixon," "The Seafarer," and "Rock 'n' Roll"), have found something in it that I, frankly, just didn't see.
People have praised its poetic language, its brutal frankness, its damaged but riveting characters, and so forth. What I saw was a 100-minute play that aims to be shocking, to assault the audience with raw truths about human nature, but that instead left me feeling emotionally flat, tired, and more than a little annoyed.
Some of the annoyance, I'll grant you, was purely physical. The play takes place in the grimy, trash-strewn break room of an anonymous office building, a setting that Eric Levenson creates in dreary detail, right down - or up - to the giant ceiling panels of fluorescent light. Levenson and lighting designer Jeff Adelberg have aimed these panels directly in the face of the audience, and the lights stay glaringly on throughout the show (except for a brief, "suspenseful" blackout near the end).
No doubt this is a deliberate choice, meant perhaps to heighten our discomfort with the play and its characters. It's less clear whether an intermittent buzzing whine is also a deliberate part of Cameron Willard's sound design, but the combination is certainly as discomfiting as any playwright could desire. The question, though, is whether a dull, constant headache is really likely to sharpen anyone's appreciation of a play.
As for the play - well, as I said, I can't say much. On paper, it sort of looks like poetry, because Harrower has laid it out in short, interrupted lines with little punctuation. On the stage, however, it plays less like poetry than like an acting exercise. The two characters engage in power struggles, interrupt and embellish and contradict each other's stories, and eventually express their conflicting emotions in physical as well as verbal ways.
