In today’s Wall Street Journal I review webcasts of David Rabe’s Suffocation Theory and Samuel D. Hunter’s Lewiston/Clarkston. Here’s an excerpt.
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Dallas’ Undermain Theatre offered one of the most spectacular examples of how webcasting can put a regional drama company on the national map when it presented a flawless virtual production of Conor McPherson’s “St. Nicholas” in October. Now it’s returned to the well with David Rabe’s “Suffocation Theory,” a dramatized version of a short story originally published in the New Yorker in 2020. Like “St. Nicholas,” “Suffocation Theory” isa chillingly dark monologue performed by Bruce DuBose, the company’s producing artistic director, who is also a gifted actor. But this production is even more technically ambitious than its predecessor, so much so that it looks and feels less like a stage show than a miniature movie. Call it what you will, “Suffocation Theory” is a dazzling piece of theatrical work…
The emergence of Samuel D. Hunter as a playwright of consequence has been one of the most gratifying theatrical occurrences of the past decade. His plays, which are set in northern Idaho (his home state) and portray small-town life and its discontents in a soft-spoken yet searching way, remind me strongly of the work of Horton Foote and Brian Friel, two other playwrights who understood in their bones the quiet complexities of the towns from which they came.
“Lewiston/Clarkston,” a pair of separate but related 90-minute plays that were first performed as a single-evening diptych with a dinner break off Broadway in 2018, is Mr. Hunter’s most ambitious undertaking to date…
“This is not the place for me to say what my own beliefs are in the matters with which religion deals, but it is only proper that I should state my conviction that no one of the faiths that men have embraced is ample enough to account for the enormous mystery. They seem to me like blind alleys cut into a primeval jungle and man deceives himself when he thinks they can lead him to its heart.”
“Perhaps no one that we know of was more tolerant than Cervantes; but tolerance is not an umbrella that you take when you think it will rain and leave at home when it looks fine; tolerance is a staff that you carry with you always in all the circumstances of life.”
