THEATRE: Andrew Wilson
NEED relief from mind-dulling television? Take a dose of Death-Defying Acts on at Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre until December 21 – three brilliant, hilarious and incisive one-act playlets by David Mamet, Woody Allen and Elaine May. They are thematically interwoven glimpses of urban America, all employing sparkling dialogue to parody and penetrate the effects of modern society’s neuroses, urban alienation, infidelity and social cynicism.
Mamet’s twenty-minute play, An Interview, is a finely crafted piece of stylised verbal gymnastics which sees a lawyer trying to give account of himself and his profession to an unsympathetic attendant in Hell’s consulting room. It’s a Kafkaesque encounter with the officialdom of the afterlife that ties the lawyer in the same knots he used to weave during life.
Hotline, by Elaine May, is a multi-textured look at the effects of alienation in an urban jungle, and the demise of real community living. Dorothy, a Brooklyn hooker, is isolated and depressed in her apartment. Trying telephonic contact with the outside world, she comes up against a barrage of bureaucratic ineptitude, and a rookie suicide-hotline worker with his accompanying baggage of de-personalised psycho-babble. But once the playwright breaks through the surface of the encounter, she exposes a dichotomy of frightening urban desolation as well as a deep-rooted humanity. It’s a witty, tragic portrait of people making a real connection, despite the institutionalised veneer of caring offered by society.
Central Park West finds Woody Allen at his farcical, brilliant best – it’s a rollercoaster ride on the back of infidelity, deceit and a pathetically funny mid-life crisis. There’s loads of dirty laundry aired, transforming the cosy, moneyed Central Park apartment into a battleground.
Death-Defying Acts is as elegant as an Armani suit – tailoring society’s ills and idiosyncracies into an intelligent, unsentimental comic exercise which, coupled with superb performances from the cast, is in a class of its own.