| When Sam Gold isn’t maiming Shakespeare, he’s a fine director of contemporary work by some of our best new playwrights. Here he takes on Will Arbery’s new play, CORSICANA, which, while not as cohesive as his HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING, is nonetheless consistently absorbing not least because Arbery really captures our need to narrate to one another how we meet the world and what it does to us. Joan Didion’s maxim—we tell ourselves stories in order to live—is the fulcrum of his writing. In CORSICANA there are some gorgeously rendered stories that are heightened by Arbery’s tendency to mysticize quotidian experience, to find religion in regular speech and our need to communicate. His characters speak plainly but feverishly; each is possessed by the desire to have something happen to them, something larger and more bracing that what’s already happened. This longing is mostly muted and the more affecting for it. Gold matches Arbery’s modesty with a bare, stark even, presentation that paradoxically binds the play—and maybe masks some of its structural disunity—and sets it free. Because nothing is really going on we can better hear what’s happening. Language is action. One of the four characters here has Down’s syndrome, as does Arbery’s sister, and so she speaks with some difficulty. What’s most compelling is not the sound we make but our drive to make it in the face of confusion and, for many, indifference. CORSICANA is a play about how speech both joins and strands us. And how it’s hard to come by. |
