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Bruce Norris is like a skilled painter who cant stand paint.
Or a sculptor whos morally repulsed by clay.
His characters are at best well-meaning fools and at worst downright villains.
Its a big laugh line, and its not necessarily wrong.
But, likeThe Low Roadoverall, it leaves you cold when the laughter dies down.
If were all screwed and self-indulgent and self-serving to boot then why in factarewe still telling these stories?
Yes, theAdam Smithwho wroteThe Wealth of Nations.
at baby Jim as she feeds him).
He reeks of entitlement and dumb luck even as he preaches self-sufficiency and bootstrap theory.
In one of the plays zingier exchanges, Jim whines, What advantages haveI?
I come fromnothing, to a Quaker-like congregation that has taken him in out of generosity.
Youre not a Negro, dryly responds John Blanke, the man Jim has recently purchased as a slave.
Youre not a woman, adds Constance Pugh, the daughter of the assemblys patriarch.
Youre not blind, chimes in the patriarch himself, who is.
Jims only rebuttal is a shrill, Nay,fie ont.
(Basically, 18th-century-ese for Fuck off.)
Constances secret is that she moonlights as a highwayman.
Despite being less developed than Iwujis character, Constance finds fiery, steely life in Perkinss performance.
The play leaves her behind for a while, and I missed her when it did.
Thats not surprising, inspired as it was by Paul Ryans rise in the 2012 presidential race.
Its a bleak illustration of a central Norris-ian conviction, that progress is an illusion.
And like the play as a whole, its both entertaining and disturbingly numbing in its hopelessness.
Norris has made his case plain: The human experiment is a failure.
The end is near (just wait for the weird, sci-fi twist atThe Low Roads conclusion).
Weve fucked it all up irretrievably.
Everything about it is, in Norriss own words,just world-destroying.
Well, I dont buy it.
Newsflash: Anyone who truly believes that is free to stop making them or watching them at any time.
Norris, for all his black despair, has not.
The Low Roadis at the Public Theater.
