Shooting the Moon

What? Ah, sorry. That's just the problem: Even though Shanley's intellectual wankeries are provocative, in a way, they don't even try to be dramatic. Since Dirty Story is a play — as opposed to, say, a tract or a pamphlet or a thesis paper or a midnight rant from Robert Graves — this is troubling. And doubly so, given that all of his artistic smarts are blinkered by only a dim awareness of his own subject matter. Though the zigs and zags of Shanley's self-referencing avant-gardiness are very high-brow, his analysis of foreign affairs never rises above Cliff's Notes-level Chomsky. Is it accurate? Probably. Is it funny? Yes! At first. For a while, Fabregat's incarnation of a swinging-dick cowboy America (called "Frank") is just about the coolest thing you've ever seen. But since Shanley has only two or three points to make — that Israel and Palestine both have valid grievances, that America is a well-meaning doofus that has yet to face its own myriad culpabilities, that England is the cleaner-shrimp to America's moray eel — the play soon begins to look a little demented, like Shanley just couldn't stop whaling on his targets, no matter that they died long ago. You begin to see how angry he is, and it's unsettling — his rage is restless, and his attempt to pin it down in Dirty Story is a series of circuitous failures.

For a good play that aims low and hits everything, check out Cheryl L. West's Jar the Floor at the Women's Theatre Project. It is the opposite of pretentious: It aims to be nothing more than a day in the life of an ordinary black family with a pedestrian set of demons.

Jar the Floor takes place entirely on the 90th birthday of the family's matriarch, MaDear (Carolyn Johnson). MaDear is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's and is looked after by her granddaughter, MayDee (Karen Stephens), a fast-rising academic. MaDear's daughter, Lola (Charlette Seward), helps out while MayDee is at work. MayDee and Lola are looking forward, with some apprehension, to the arrival of the family's youngest woman, Vennie (Lela Elam), a free-spirited musician who doesn't get home much. When she arrives, you may instinctively flinch at the barely suppressed hostility floating through the air between Vennie and her mother MayDee, and you will certainly marvel at all that is apparently not being said. It's like witnessing a truly painful case of existential constipation.

But all will come out, eventually. Over the course of the women's long and dysfunctional slog through the preparations for MaDear's party, more grievances are aired than you'd think possible, and they all arise organically. The play opened two weeks ago, and during the first weekend, Seward seemed a little uncomfortable with her lines — and this, through some special alchemy, did things for the show that having the script down pat could never have achieved. Seward is apparently a master improviser, and watching her try on the half-remembered lines and get into their motivations was revelatory. Seward inhabits her character from the marrow out, and everything she does, and almost everything about the play, thrums with the rhythms of real humanity and real family life. If Stephens has not been witness to some serious workaholism and parental condescension and if Johnson has not had plenty of hands-on experience with Alzheimer's patients, I would be very surprised.

Jar the Floor is occasionally maudlin — the histrionics of the denouement are particularly regrettable — but its small failures barely register. The slow and cautious unspooling of this family's past hurts is as affecting as West's goals are humble. She shatters no paradigms, and so far, no one has complained.