Terre Haute

Written by Edmund White

Directed by George Perrin

59E59 Theaters

59 East 59th Street

212-753-5959

 

Review by Emily Weiss

  

American Psycho: Nick Westrate doesn't want to be just another killer in Terre Haute.

 

Edmund White’s Terre Haute imagines a meeting between two characters closely based on Gore Vidal and Timothy McVeigh. Like their real-life counterparts, the two men come from wildly different Americas: One is an acclaimed, elderly writer named James; the other is a militaristic, uneducated young man named Harrison.

 

James, a smug intellectual, has come to Terre Haute, Indiana, to interview Harrison, who will soon face execution for blowing up a federal building and killing 168 people. Despite disparate backgrounds and the plastic-walled cell that separates Harrison from James, the two men have a psychologically penetrative exchange. Amidst mild flirting and banter, James comes to see Harrison as a tragic figure. He muses that, if only Harrison’s mind had been put to good use rather than absorbed in conspiracy theories, the killer’s life would have been completely different.

 

Pity, as well as infatuation, causes James to understand his subject’s lack of repentance and empathize with him. He knows that Harrison depends on him to tell his story so that history doesn’t remember him as just another nihilistic American killer, a mere Jeffrey Dahmer. However, if James did not explicitly reveal his attraction to Harrison to the audience, there would be no evidence for such a feeling. The actors simply lack chemistry. While Peter Eyre gives an excellent performance as James, he fails to convince us of his character’s pivotal crush. Nick Westrate, as Harrison, is well cast for his boyish-yet-tough looks, although his performance is overly histrionic. He shouts and delivers his lines with far too much enthusiasm, when a more restrained, soldier-like demeanor would have better conveyed Harrison’s intensity.

  

Despite some flaws in this production, White has written a compelling script that highlights American class tensions, human loneliness and isolation. And even if, at times, he borders on a caricature of a pedant, the character of James is eloquent, and his sermons are engaging. 

 

At a time when Americans have been receptive to the idea of unity and put-off by dehumanizing, divisive rhetoric, Terre Haute’s message stands out as relevant to the zeitgeist. No matter how reprehensible we find someone’s actions, we owe him, for humanity’s sake, our attention.