By: Ronnie Ruff
Edna Walsh has yet to achieve the popularity in America that Conor McPherson has but he is, none the less, one of the most important new playwrights in contemporary Irish theatre. Solas Nua, one of the most exciting local theatre companies around has mounted Bedbound, Walsh’s 2000 play at the DCAC in Adams Morgan. As the lights go down in the small DCAC space a large box that fills the stage collapses, three sides fall to the stage floor to reveal a single bed containing two adults. A physically imposing large man fully dressed in a rumpled business suit and a crippled young lady, her legs bent behind her, lay partially covered by a sheet. What follows is a play of incredibly strong emotional monologues that tell a complex story of the symbiotic relationship between these two crippled people. A young woman with polio (Linda Murray) and her psychotic father Maxie (Brian Hemmingsen) offer anger filled descriptions of their lives and explain how circumstances have brought them to this place of suffering.
Pinter’s The New World Order and Other Plays currently mounted at Warehouse Theatre by Scena Theatre is a cluster of angry one act plays that speak to the oppressive governments that abuse the citizenry of the third world. Mainly aimed at the west, the three one acts depict the atrocities against the Kurds in Turkey, the people of Nicaragua and the citizens of Iraq. All three of the plays are generic in nature describing only the most vague situations of abuse. Details are minimal, we do not know anything really about the victims or the abusers, only that the victims are shaking with fear and the torturers are giddy with anticipation of bloodletting. It is the impending physical torture that provides the buildup to an anticipated ending that never happens.
