Why Torture Is Wrong, And The People Who Love Them

Written by Christopher Durang

Directed by Nicholas Martin

The Public Theater

425 Lafayette Street

212-967-7555

 

Review by Amy Krivohlavek

 

Pain Management: Kristine Nielsen and Laura Benanti discover Why Torture Is Wrong in Durang's latest.

 

An intoxicating mix of the personal and the political, the plot of Christopher Durang’s hilarious, poignant new play hangs on that innocent little comma in the title. There’s an immense spectrum of possibility between torture and affection, and, as gracefully calibrated by Nicholas Martin’s splashy direction, Durang’s dizzy domestic dramedy captures a symphony of topics, themes and tones — all within a few marvelous, madcap hours.

 

When Felicity (Laura Benanti) wakes up in bed with a stranger, she has no memory of what happened the night before. Not such an absurd scenario, really, but this tall, dark, handsome — and ominously exotic — man is Zamir (Amir Arison), who quickly produces a marriage certificate, an angry streak and a desperate, delusional need to preserve their marriage. “All the women in my family are dead,” he calmly tells her.

 

The freaked-out Felicity takes him home to meet her parents, two delicious, quintessentially Durangian characters: her father, Leonard (the terrific Richard Poe), quickly pulls a gun on Zamir, and his “butterfly collection” turns out to be a locked chamber filled with tools of torture. His intense paranoia and bigoted pronouncements overlap with his creepy references to “Father Knows Best.” He’s his own perverse invention of conservative American values and entitlement, twisted into horrific proportions.

 

Felicity’s mother, on the other hand, is obsessed with escapism. The brilliant Kristine Nielsen is a kick as the dotty Luella, who is more concerned with discussing theater than investigating the shouts behind locked doors. “I don’t really know what normal is — that’s why I go to the theater,” she tells Felicity, sweetly unleashing a torrent of amusing observations about contemporary plays. (But note the jab: How much faith do we, should we, place in truths told from the stage?)

 

Rounding out the cast are Hildegarde (Audrie Neenan), a comically ineffectual member of the “shadow government”; Reverend Mike (John Pankow), a clergyman/porn director; and the Voice (David Aaron Baker), the cheeky, intrusive narrator.

 

The luminous, wide-eyed Benanti is a natural for Durang’s work, while Arison craftily cloaks Zamir in mystery — an arresting ambiguity that drives the production. Is he a terrorist or a porn actor? Is he out for Felicity’s money or her love? As the action crescendos into claustrophobic chaos, Felicity extracts herself to turn back the clock. As she strides through David Korins’s fantastically conceived set of revolving rooms, we arrive back at the beginning, before everything went wrong.

 

Here, at this innocent moment of boy-meets-girl, Durang asks how we get from handshakes to horror, from flirtation to frenzy. A timely indictment of our very modern fears and sensibilities, the play doesn’t need to tell us why torture is wrong — only how very much in the dark we are as we scramble to understand it. But as the characters dance (appropriately, to “Dancing in the Dark”), Durang reassures us that, though we may be in the dark, we are never alone.