"Blasted" at Shotgun Players

Shotgun Players photo by Cheshire Isaacs

I've been anticipating this night for more than a year. Last September, when Shotgun announced that they were going to produce Sarah Kane's play Blasted this season, there was kind of a collective gasp from the audience from those who knew about the play. I wasn't one of those, because I didn't know about it. I have come to understand that this is kind of the third-rail of modern theater, a play so controversial because of its explicit onstage portrayal of truly awful human behavior that for the most part no theater will touch it.

Shotgun, however, is in the midst of a a couple of seasons of intentionally working to get patrons to actively react to their productions, hosting nightly talkbacks and choosing plays that really insist that the audience engage both in the auditorium and (at least intellectually) afterward. So producing Blasted is at a minimum going to invoke some strong reactions of "why are they doing this?"

And before I did too deeply into this production, I should add my usual disclaimer that I am a member of the board of the Shotgun Players, so I am involved with this theater, though not really in the artistic aspects, just on the business side. Although I often sponsor productions at Shotgun, Blasted was not one.

The Play

Sarah Kane was an extremely controversial and noteworthy playwright in the 1990s. She  was also deeply, clinically depressed, and only wrote five plays before she committed suicide in 1999. She apparently started by writing a play about an older man and younger woman meeting up in a hotel, but was distracted by the genocide going on in Bosnia at the time, and decided to tackle the issue of how people could attend theater as a distraction from the gross inhumanity taking place daily by bringing some of that inhumanity onto the stage.

And make no mistake, the play brings inhumanity in both large and small senses into an inescapable room in front of our eyes. There is no way to avoid the full range of bad human interactions from really small microaggressions in the conversation of the two lovers meeting up to the full on, physical and psychic attacks and other transgressions that follow later. There is really no way to escape the fact that our characters behave really, really badly to one another. And there are plenty of reasons that no one under 18 is admitted to the theater for this show.

It's ugly, it's cruel, and it's pretty relentless. But that is kind of the point. War is hell, and Kane wants us to know that you can't get away from that just because you're not directly in the war. It affects us all.

The play spends a considerable portion of its time allowing Ian and Cate to really descend into some bad places, tinged with some real humanity and affection, though not in a very appealing way. Only later does the larger aspect of war intrude in the person of the Soldier. And only then do we get truly blasted.

The characters are well-written and believable, though I'm not sure how relatable any of them are, perhaps with the exception of the soldier, who seems to have had a lot of this thrust upon him. The other two seem to be inexplicably drawn together in a mutually destructive relationship that can't possibly lead anywhere good for either.

The Production

If you're going to do this play at all, you have to do it well: No one wants to see an ugly unicorn. So Shotgun has recruited an excellent cast of actors, top-notch designers, and tasked company member Jon Tracy to direct. In my limited exposure, it's clear that Tracy does not shy away from a difficult challenge, so he seems an ideal candidate to tackle this play. Similarly, the three actors need to be convincing professionals, and Robert Parsons (Ian), Adrienne Kaori Walters (Cate), and Joe Estlack (Soldier) are all terrific in their portrayals. Parsons carries perhaps the heaviest load, since he is on stage virtually the whole play, and even when he is offstage, his presence dominates the mood.

The initial scene is an excellent setup for the remainder of the show. Ian and Cate come onstage separately, each silently reacting to the hotel-room set (stunningly designed, as usual, by Nina Ball) in dramatically different ways. So before anyone speaks, we know there will be some areas of conflict. The lighting by Heather Basarab and sound by Matt Stines make the whole thing work, as the hotel and its occupants get quite literally blasted along with all the emotional explosions.

Indeed, I don't really have issues with the way the show was presented. The hotel room looks quite authentic--I'd stay there. And the acting is really well done. All three actors have crawled into some very difficult characters and found a space that entirely works for them. And the intimacy of the small stage placed so close to the front row of seats makes it impossible to avoid the matters that confront the audience. It's right there, in your face.

So, What's the Big Deal?

The question, as noted earlier, is why one does this play. It's not enough to just make a big splash--the world is full of people behaving very, very badly. That's not news. The question is, why put this on stage?

And truthfully, I'm still grappling with that question. I don't question the importance of the issues. Indeed, we see those issues portrayed, albeit with less immediacy, fairly frequently. There are tons of movies that portray the horrors of war, both on the combatants and civilians, in even greater detail than this play does. There are lots of plays that portray a lot of these same issues, too, although more symbolically or metaphorically. And there are abundant sources of first-person accounts of these atrocities (Elie Weisel's Night comes to mind) and documentary films and historical documents that illustrate this behavior in real situations.

It's not like we don't know this stuff. So I'm of two minds when it comes to the question of why put this on stage. What jumps to mind is that, as with any live theater production, especially in a small house, there is an ineffable, tangible experience that is qualitatively different from other media. And that may be true for some. But for me, at least, reading accounts or seeing documentary footage is extremely visceral, and in ways that any artifice, even extremely well-done artifice, cannot duplicate.

There is probably an argument to be made that if theater wants to make a statement on this subject, this is the way it has to do it. We can't put actual holocaust survivors or historical footage on stage (although, now that I think of it, the Tracy-directed show Leni at Aurora last season did some of that quite effectively--using historical footage and artistic portrayals of historical figures, though in service of a quite different message). But there is a case to be made that this might be the closest live theater can come to the experience of a war documentary or memoir.

But another side of me ponders the notion that in fact Kane's premise is incorrect, that there is nothing per se wrong with escaping from the reality of the days news and atrocities to go to the theater. On some level, there is value in allowing oneself to remember that there is, in fact, something better out there. That one can aspire to remember and to strive to be the "better angels" that we know can inhabit us. Indeed there are many examples of people surviving periods of atrocity by engaging either in the practice or the memory of art, music, or even theater.

In short, it's not clear to me that the only way theater can address these issues is by dragging us all down into them in person. It is one way, and it is effective and thought-provoking, but it's definitely not the only way, and I'm not even sold that it's the most effective way.

Bottom Line

Regardless of whether the approach appeals to one, it is clear that the issues addressed are important and timely. And frankly, there's no reason necessarily to shy away from producing a play such as this. It will be controversial, but controversy is the key to discussion and thought. Far too many productions here in the bay area preach to a choir of the already converted, safely allowing us to land on the same side of what might be a controversial issue or presentation elsewhere. It's nice to see a theater taking on a subject and presentation that its own artistic company, staff, and audience disagree on the merits of.

In that sense, it's worth seeing to make up your own mind. I have to say that after a year of anticipation and warnings and such, I didn't find much in this play to be actually shocking, though much of it is quite disturbing, and it's hard to see it happening live in front of you on stage.

The show runs for one more week, through October 22nd.