Conscience pushes people to extremes in Sam Shepard’s Simpatico . Devanaughn Theatre’s production (at the Piano Factory through February 12) takes us on a joyride down a freeway paved with betrayal and deceit. Our escorts are souls who have cracked from guilt and aimlessness. We’re thrilled by the trip’s speed and the risks it take — largely the result of Shepard’s shrewd grip on American vernacular and his fascination with the dismal state of American morality. But the awkwardly crafted script delivers suspense that vaporizes rather than combusts. We’re on a race to a vacant lot rather than to any gratifying destination.
The 1994 play is like a postscript to the writer’s more psychologically textured and visceral True West , in which he nails the antagonistic dynamic between the primitive social outcast and the ambitious if conventional climber. This time around, that conflict erupts, with the muted intensity of a film noir, in the realm of California thoroughbred racing. Unkempt, whiskey-swigging, quasi-delusional hooligan Vinnie (Joe O’Connor) scrapes by on hush money sent to him by childhood pal Carter (Angelo K. Athanasopoulos), a con-man-turned-corporate-drone who married Vinnie’s girlfriend and fled to Kentucky. Twenty years earlier, the two pulled off a scam that toppled a horseracing kingpin, Simms (Phil Thompson). Carter visits Vinnie and offers a large sum for incriminating evidence that will enable Carter to bury the swindle in the tomb of the past. Enter Cecilia (Susan Gross), the supermarket clerk with whom Vinnie has a history, though he’s cryptic, even untruthful, when he speaks about her. Eager and naive, she’s roped into the scheme to obtain information from Simms, and their encounter is the production’s high point. Thompson delivers a robust, self-possessed performance as the lecherous fallen bigshot, the only one who benefitted from the long-ago scandal. The cast sling the rat-tat-tat dialogue like a tennis foursome volleying at the net, but in the first act, under Jeannie-Marie Brown’s dithering direction, they appear as unclear about their characters’ inner drives as we are about the details of the convoluted ploy.
Extremity is also what Diane Edgecomb aimed for in her solo show Restraints, which wrapped up its world-premiere run at Charlestown Working Theater last weekend. It’s billed as “an imagistic journey along the boundaries of madness and spiritual transcendence,” and there were moments when the Grotowski-influenced Edgecomb conveyed the precariousness of an unstable human balancing on sanity’s tightrope. But for the most part the event was a self-indulgent pageant. Rumi’s poetry, nursery rhymes, acts of aberrant eroticism, straitjacket stunts, and clumsy Cirque du Soleil–style acrobats went into the blender, and out came a gooey potion unsuitable for consumption.
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