Intiman's Prayer for My Enemy: Better Than Cats?
At Seattlest, the commenter is king, partly because we get away with writing less when we quote! So here's this thumbnail review of Prayer for My Enemy: "It manages to address some very serious topics (acted out extremely well) and then another second switch to being really light-hearted." You are correct, commenter!
It's a profane, messy, wild-hearted reveille about Right Now, gleefully mashing the personal up with the political. The play snagged us from the start, seconds in. John McDermott's minimal set (sneakily, all about projecting into the audience) aside, the larger setting is the Intiman if your life, not Art, had smuggled itself inside.
The thing is, playwright Craig Lucas and director Bart Sher are crazy people and they decided it would be all right if they gave Seattle first look at a play that features two hilariously foul-mouthed, drug-friendly 20-something guys, Billy (Daniel Zaitchik) and Tad (James McMenamin), who used to be best friends in school -- but who kinda grew apart after they, you know, made out with each other, CLEARLY! only as preparation for when they'd find a chick to score with -- and who, as the play starts, run into each other again at a gas station. In other words, two guys, more or less, who can be found any night of the week on Broadway.
Being a cum laude graduate of the Kevin Smith School of Diction is one thing, but Lucas takes that hardened, heart-poor speech and squishes it up against squirmingly frank interior monologues that come right in the flow of conversation so that you're not always sure if someone is finally saying what's on their mind and if this is the big dramatic moment. Which is a good, alert place for an audience to be.
Lucas appreciates the very real sense of dread and futility balancing the fun of a fiery, truth-telling speech. He strips away the rationales for speaking and for not speaking, and says that while silence can make us sick and pride makes us shout, there's a quieter way of talking, where we ask for what's in someone else's best interests. If the play is funny -- and it is, like when a firecracker goes off in someone else's hand -- it's funnier because it's saying that stuff we leave unsaid. (Regular people "we," not Seattlest we.)
At the gas station, Billy mentions he's about to ship off to Iraq, and invites Tad to drop in at his going-away party with his family: his bipolar, AA-going dad Austin (John Procaccino, in a gloriously ragged, outsized performance), mom Karen (Cynthia Lauren Tewes, giving off fumes of bovine anxiety), sister Marianne, the comparatively speaking "level-headed" one (Chelsey Rives, catching just the right "she's her father's daughter" notes).
Lucas could make some easy points off this family, off "Bipolar Dad" and "Homemaker Mom," off Iraq, off gay/straight, but he doesn't because family -- especially dysfunctional family -- can tell us a lot about ourselves: who we are, who we want to be, and who we're scared of being.
In a separate story, there's the compassionate-but-cranky Dolores (Kimberly King, playing a sweet quiet-home-seeking-missile of menopausal age), who seems dragooned from the streets of Kirkland with her tirades about hating to go into the city and the beauties of relaxed, upper middle-class rustic life. What ties her to the rest of the characters turns out not to be as plausible as her simple being is. (It's a forgivable misstep, and not for standing out as plot or metaphor; we just weren't made aware that what we saw earlier was one of Chekhov's loaded guns.)
Prayer For My Enemy runs through August 26 at the Intiman. Tickets range from $10 (25 and under) to $48.
Photo Chris Bennion © 2007 – From left: Cynthia Lauren Tewes (Karen), John Procaccino (Austin), James McMenamin (Tad) and Daniel Zaitchik (Billy) in Prayer for My Enemy.
