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Theres some truth in that, and yet something about Levensons play doesnt sit right with me.
Its a slick piece of work, a little too calculated for my taste.
Even if youre frustrated by the rhetoric of todays radical leftists, theyre not the ones planting bombs.
Does a theyll grow out of it play actually feel right right now?
Wheres the line between the potential wisdom in Levensons play and its own brand of self-regard?
Only one person on stage really changes duringDays of Rage.
That person is Jenny (Lauren Patten).
Spence and Jenny have known each other since childhood.
The apparent free-love fest is loaded with unspoken jealousies, resentments, and tensions.
Nothing about these kids is as free as theyd like to believe.
In fact, theyre mentally and spiritually rigid.
The hole that exists instead of a solid sense of self.
There is actually no such thing as atheism, said David Foster Wallace in a2005 commencement addressat Kenyon College.
There is no such thing as not worshipping.
Its slow work, and their collective is hurting on the numbers front.
Two of its former members have skipped town for Ann Arbor, where the Weather Underground was founded.
There was a calendar.
Who was supposed to sleep with who.
Go home to their families.
Those are your people, right?
Both of them scoff when he tells them he voted for Humphrey.
Yeah, thats not really how change happens, though, is it?
Spence drawls, Voting.
When Hal next sees Jenny, his eyes are hard with irony.
They told me a lot of stuff I didnt know, he says coolly.
Oh, and racism.
I had no idea it was even a problem before I talked to them.
Shes the human equivalent of the Milgram experiments, bringing out the basest instincts in everyone she touches.
But she also brings out the shallowest impulses in the play.
It just felt so easy for him to say.
So free of risk.
That same complacency is hiding insideDays of Rage, under the guise of complexity.
Days of Rageis at Second Stage.
