| “Everyone’s becoming a picture.” It’s what we are after we die, whether in a frame or in someone else’s mind. PUBLIC OBSCENITIES takes up the subject of images and of how we imagine ourselves and others. On the surface, it’s a story about a young gay couple, one Indian-American, the other African-American, who travel to India to research how Grinder is utilized there. Of course, Grinder is a cynosure of image peddling, but the play is a subtler, even bardic, thing. It skims across the sheen of gender, sexual and cultural representations—and misrepresentations—but finds its heart in the mystery of image and how impossible it is to be entirely known to someone and maybe even to know ourselves. It’s arguably too long and deliberately paced, but PUBLIC OBSCENITIES is nonetheless absorbing throughout, steeped as it is in the ordinariness and the mystery of communication. If things go well, we move slowly through life and then, to quote another bard, “we die but we don’t.” |
