What is unacceptable? The answer is always subjective. We each have our own internal demarcation for behavior that crosses the line. Theater, at its best, has often dramatized the dangerous bend of those boundaries. Politics, at its worst, has sadly done the same.
In this sense, we live in the saddest of times. Unacceptable has become our new normal. Moral and ethical boundaries that once seemed, if not sacrosanct, then at least sharply drawn, are now erasure marks on a trail without a map. Are we lost yet? Can’t even say.
The surrender that renders the ‘unacceptable’ acceptable is the terrain Wallace Shawn frighteningly explores in his new play, Evening at the Talk House, produced by the New Group and directed, quite slyly, by Scott Elliott. It is hardly new turf for Shawn, whose plays have often conjured similar shadow realms. Most of those works have felt futuristic, if not dystopian. Evening at the Talk House registers like a furtive glance back, an attempt to determine where we lost our way.
I hated every minute of it, which is a compliment here. The characters, a clutch of theater folks at a reunion marking the 10th anniversary of a fondly recollected play they all once had a hand in, are not so much a distasteful lot as they are a collection of acrid aftertastes. Disconnection abounds. Numbing quantities of food and drink are served. An unnerving sense of dread permeates the assembly of affable, seemingly well-intenioned, largely late-middle-aged, show folks who are clearly hiding something or, rather, hiding from something.
That something, unsurprisingly, proves to be themselves. Just about everyone onstage has sold out in one sense or another, we soon learn. The least poisonous (though no less noxious) sellouts have been artistic. Leaching into the theatrical small talk, however, are intimations of sellouts far more horrific, sellouts that cross the line into violence and murder.
WIth theater itself an essentially dead art form in this unbrave new world, more than a few of the unemployable show people acknowledge having picked up part-time government work to make ends meet, work they refer to as “targeting.” This proves just as bad as it sounds. Targeting involves reviewing lists of names and applying government criteria to select those who deserve to die – and will soon be killed. Some, like Mr. Shawn’s own character, an increasingly isolated and dissolute old actor, are finding themselves being beaten up, almost sociably, by so-called “friends.” Others, we hear, have been dragged into the street – also by “friends” – beaten and hung.
Just the new normal, the self-justifying tone of the talkers tells us. Nothing to get righteous about. These targeted people are threats. They need to die, for our own safety.
And there we are.
Mr. Shawn is abetted by a strong cast that deftly walks the line between charm, smarm and nausea. Matthew Broderick plays the anniversary playwright, now an established television writer and producer, whose professional success and abject moral decline may be measured by his acknowledged acquaintance with, and proximity to, the nation’s mercurial, ruthlessly all-powerful leader, a former-television personality. Television pops up repeatedly as one of the few shared points of reference that all the characters retain. Death ultimately comes to dominate virtually everyone’s conversation.
I didn’t bring my kids to see Evening at the Talk House. They’re already scared enough by what passes for our reality. The fact that this disturbing play exists is a testament to how far we have already come and what a short distance we have to go before it is too late. See it while you can.