The Speed of Darkness is a new play by Steve Tesich. Recently presented by the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, it will, I am sure, make its way rapidly into the repertoire of American regional theater. Tesich is probably best known for his screenplays: Eyewitness, Four Friends, The World According to Garp, Eleni, and Breaking Away--for which he won an Academy Award in 1980. He has also written extensively for the theater, including Touching Bottom and Division Street. The Speed of Darkness is an ambitious, brave, if somewhat flawed work.
The play is set in a small town in South Dakota, where Joe and his wife, Ann, appear to be living the American Dream. He is a successful building contractor, she a contented and proud wife. They are happily married, comfortably in love. Their daughter, Mary, is about to leave for college. As the play opens we learn that Joe has just been nominated as South Dakota's "man of the year."
This all sounds too blissful to be true, of course, but this is part of Tesich's theatrical game. The first scene of the play is a positive avalanche of clichés. It resembles a television sitcom, it sounds like a television sitcom, and I, for one, felt distinctly uneasy at the prospect of two more hours of predictable jokes and predictable daughters hugging predictable fathers being predictably indulgent. The first stylistic hint that Tesich is playing a theatrical game is the news that real estate developers are announcing plans to build a housing development on one of the great mesas that the family can see from the big picture window in the house that Joe built himself. It signals in a simple, uncomplicated way the destruction of a dream.
Then there is a second interruption of this idyllic life--more ominous, but curiously touched with charm and laughter. Lou, a friend from Joe's days in the army, comes to visit. They had served together in Vietnam in the 1960s, and worked together after the war. Then Lou had drifted. In fact, it is clear from his appearance and behavior that Lou is now homeless and destitute. He has traveled across the country following an exhibit of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. While Lou is obsessed with the past, Joe is obsessed with burying that past. He never talks about the war.
Brilliant Quirkiness
These two characters embody the conflicts of the play. The play deals with the suppression of truth and the horrors of that truth. It is about the polarities of the American dream and the American nightmare. It is about a metaphor as old as Oedipus--that darkness is necessary for the appreciation and understanding of light, that the brightness of truth can be seen even by the blind, and that the speed of darkness is swift.
The Speed of Darkness attempts to tackle subjects lying deeper beneath the skin of America. It attempts to tell of matters festering in the body politic, themes larger and more ambitious than anything that Tesich has ever done before. And the attempt is largely successful. After its intentionally, almost complacent beginning, the play begins a gyroscopic descent into pain.
Lou's attempts to make Joe recognize the horror of his past start with open humor, slip into cynicism, then spin into despair. But nothing seems to move Joe. He has a savage
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