Blasted

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY MAIM? Sadler helps Van Swearingen keep an eye out.

Photo: Andy Rothenberg

For all its famous shredding savagery—a guy’s eyeballs get chewed out of their sockets, a baby’s corpse gets cannibalized—the vivid onstage violence of Sarah Kane’s Blasted doesn’t offer much resonant meaning beyond War’s hell. Though while it was publicly decried by many critics as a meaningless stomach turner in its 1993 London premiere, one of the few images with metaphorical impact might have led subconsciously to its dismissal.

In a motel room in a war-torn city (Kane wrote the play in reaction to Bosnia), a holed-up, amoral journalist (finely haggard Van Swearingen) is viciously sodomized by a reckless soldier. Kane, whose parents were journalists and Christians Evangelicals, spent her short 28 years entirely at the mercy of newspapermen. Journalists reared her, critics and media frenzy helped destroy her, and after her suicide the public reassessments of her work resurrected her. A military grunt with nothing to lose fucking an inviolable, sensationalist correspondent is the kind of dense imagery that would come in her later, more abstracted plays—one of which Kane wrote under a pseudonym to avoid association with Blasted.

If its too-long-delayed Midwest premiere fails to shock, and somehow it does, in part it’s because daring storefront companies—A Red Orchid chief among them—have offered harder-hitting looks at the human condition in which stage blood and simulated sex meant more than they do here. God knows these three excellent actors can’t be faulted, though; being trapped in A Red Orchid’s broom-closet space with survivalist brutality is supposed to be what’s gripping, but the close proximity to a trio of performances this real means more.—Christopher Piatt