OFF-BROADWAY REVIEW
BEAST
Reviewed by Jenny Sandman
Published 2008-09-15
I have no idea what to think of this show.
Immediately after the curtain call, I was convinced I hated it. But then I ran into a playwright friend of mine who raved about it, who loved it—for the exact same reasons I didn’t like it. So maybe there’s more to this play than meets the eye.
Beast is the story of two soldiers just home from Iraq —one of whom just happens to be dead. But this is not your average freewheeling zombie play. Ben (Corey Stoll) and Jimmy (Logan Marshall-Green) were best buds in Iraq , but a bomb landed them both in a military hospital in Germany , badly maimed and disfigured. They manage to get home, but Ben is dead, and Jimmy is suffering from a bad case of PTSD. They careen about the country, looking for some purpose in their lives, until a fatal meeting at Mt. Rushmore (no pun intended). Their search then takes them to Crawford , Texas , for a momentous meeting with their Commander-in-Chief.
Not quite surrealist and not quite realist, the play staggers back and forth between the two, laboring to find a balance. The cast is excellent (Dan Butler’s portrayal of W is a riot), but the play spins out of control in the second act, with the soldiers’ meeting with George Bush. However, as my playwright friend pointed out to me, this could be an obvious analogy to the war’s spinning out of control. Fortunately, Beast doesn’t hammer any political agenda home; it presents us with the plight of the disfigured soldiers, struggling to continue to believe in their mission and to find some sort of life for themselves back in “the world,” but falls short of proselytizing. Even the play’s treatment of Bush resists turning him into a caricature or handy scapegoat.
While the production was great (Eugene Lee’s sets and David Van Tieghem’s sound design are some of the best I’ve seen and heard in a while), and the make-up effects even better, I felt Beast was lacking something critical. Existing as it is in that curious no-man’s-land between realism and surrealism made the more outlandish parts of the play (the zombie, a talking Mt. Rushmore) just seem weird and out of place. Had the production been more obviously fantastic or dreamlike, I might have had an easier time inhabiting the world of the play. My friend was convinced that Beast was one of the best new plays she’s ever seen; while I didn’t respond to it, I will admit that playwright Michael Weller is someone to keep an eye on.
Regardless of whether or not you like it, it’s rare that a play can produce such opposite but equally visceral reactions. It’s also rare that a play about Iraq can manage not to sermonize. Even though I didn’t like it, this is definitely a play worth seeing.
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