Senior theatre work issues play on power

Author: Emma Stanford

Saturday's closing performance of "F*ckpigs and C*ckroaches" started slowly, as would-be audience members were escorted into Hepburn Zoo to find extra crannies to occupy. For some, this was their second or third time seeing the show since its opening on Thursday; they were drawn repeatedly to its superb acting and tense depiction of the darker sides of humanity.

"F*ckpigs and C*ckroaches: A Meditation on Power," the senior work of Director Jeanine Buzali '09, melds together scenes from plays by Harold Pinter, Naomi Wallace and others. The scope is wide, ranging from American soldiers in the Kuwaiti desert to the interrogation rooms of an unnamed oppressive dictatorship. The constant in this stew of violence and lies is the distorting, brutalizing effect of one human being's power over another.

It's perhaps a good thing that Buzali cut and pasted scenes from various plays into this collage. A full-length version of any of the scenes could have been tiresome. In the scenes from Harold Pinter's "One for the Road," a passive-aggressive megalomaniac (Christo Grabowski '12) ranted at broken-down political criminals on subjects ranging from the rush of killing to the beauty of his victim's wife to the quality of the scotch he was drinking. This was interesting for a while, as the audience got an insight into the mind of a man with absolute power over other people, but there wasn't enough range to the performance for it to remain interesting. By the time we saw him interrogate the first victim's wife, shaking a little too theatrically as she stood before him, there seemed to be nothing more to say.

Fortunately, the variety of scenes kept the play moving quickly. We saw a pair of American soldiers in Kuwait, learning from a superior how to access their anger and use it against the enemy. We saw a tight-jawed official (Katie Thacher '11) rebuke another woman (Chantia Harper '12) for showing her ankles, saying of her need to dress provocatively, "You continually subvert that man's right to be a simple person! You oppress him!" In both scenes, the line between sanity and psychosis blurred: was the insane woman the one denying human sexuality or the one defined by it? The line was further blurred in a later scene, in which an American family in Rwanda, housing a Tutsi refugee, shoved him forward like a sacrificial lamb rather than have their daughter hurt by a Hutu militant. "Do we matter to you at all?" the Hutu asked, his machine gun still leveled to fire. In an unexpected and compelling twist, the villain of the show became not violence or hatred, but old-fashioned American selfishness.

In the final scene, a nervous overalled artist (Michelle Alto '12) adjusted the pose of a living model (Grabowski) while her surly, cigar-wielding mentor (Ekow Edzie '10) criticized. When she timidly suggested that the model make a strong gesture, Edzie berated her for being too obvious: "Do you have to spell everything out?" I wondered the same thing about "F*ckpigs and C*ckroaches." Did they have to dress this living model in a black torture victim's hood? Did the woman under interrogation have to be so visibly trembling? Did we need so many juxtapositions of scotch-sipping psychopaths and broken-down prisoners, so many juxtapositions of "Ave Maria" with machine-gun fire? And why, after all, did the man's cigar keep going out? Was it only so he could scream "Light!" at the artist and make her scurry to offer a Zippo?

Still, "F*ckpigs and C*ckroaches" bravely confronted the ugly side of human nature. The last moment, in which Grabowski as the model finally became animated and gave the audience a deadened stare before the lights went down, proved simple and powerful. And while there could have been more such moments, there were enough. The ensemble's superb acting and Buzali's directing more than made up for any heavy-handedness of the subject matter.