| . | 03/20/2008
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?
By: Victor Gluck
Samuel West and Scott Cohen
(photo credit: Joan Marcus)
Anyone not seeing a copy of the script of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s latest import, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, might think that the play is about an affair between two gay men. However, as one character is called “a country” in the script, it is apparent that the play is a political allegory about how politics makes strange bedfellows. Scott Cohen plays Sam (short for Uncle Sam?), an aggressive and domineering American, while Samuel West plays Guy, an Englishman almost willing to go along with any political agenda that Sam proposes.
The men first negotiate their relationship, and then segue into series of conversations about U.S. foreign policy over the last 40 years which they seem to be involved with in their work: Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, etc. What is unusual about Churchill’s dialogue in this play is that the men speak entirely in fragments, never finishing a sentence. They often pause so that the listener can complete the unspoken thought as they proceed to arguments for the use of torture or the requirements of national security. What is left to be filled in is often more disturbing than what is said. The play’s eight scenes escalate from past history, Lumumba, Allende, Saddam Hussein, spoken of in the present tense, to contemporary events like Star Wars, Guantanamo, and global warming, as though these characters have been involved in creating policy.
As the political baggage intensifies, Sam demands more and more loyalty and acceptance from Guy who has more and more trouble going along with the moral expedience. In this co-production between New York’s Public Theater and London’s Royal Court Theatre, the yellow sofa on which the men sit in a black void (the extent of effective Eugene Lee’s setting) rises higher after each scene. Metaphorically and literally, their physical position escalates as the foreign policies they appear to be advocating also rise in indefensibility. Some humor is obtained from props that magically appear from the seeming void and just as magically are returned to it. The passage of time is suggested by the change in Susan Hilferty’s costumes which also seems to occur as if by magic.
Cohen’s coolly glib Sam dominates West’s anxious, articulate Guy, while Guy vacillates from completely going along with him to having trouble stomaching the violence and the lack of humanitarian concern implicit in Sam’s directives. Cohen never loses his serenity except when he intuits that Guy is balking at giving him the unconditional “love” that he demands. Not only is Churchill condemning American foreign policy but she is also condemning Britain for having gone along with it without putting up a bigger protest. At forty-five minutes the play isn’t a moment too long, as the opaqueness and denseness of the conversations eventually puts a strain on the viewer. However, the format of the play seems to free the author to cover a great deal of recent current events that she might not have been able to discuss onstage any other way. Under the direction of James Macdonald (who also staged the London production in 2006), both actors are accomplished at the artificially staccato dialogue and the very pregnant pauses. They are also very consistent in establishing the British/American dichotomy.
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, the sixth social/political play of Caryl Churchill to have its U.S. premiere at the Public Theater following such works as Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money and The Skriker, will have as many interpretations as viewers. It is at the same time provocative and frustrating, biased and universal. It may be on the cutting edge or it may just be an exercise in anti-Americanism. Are you game enough to decide for yourself?
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (through April 6)
Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-967-7555 or http://www.publictheater.org
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