Writer: Lawrence Thelen
Director: Phil Harmer
Perhaps a sign of the insanity currently infecting American politics, and many other countries, it’s never entirely clear what is being satirised and what is being celebrated in Lawrence Thelen’s play brought to the stage by Detroit Country Day School.
Reacting to the madness of the outside world, where Walmart have taken ownership of Father Christmas and copyrighted the use of his image even by parents on Christmas Eve, Rhode Island’s Governor McGruder attempts to create a moral utopia out of the tiny state by removing all the things that he considers are wrong with the world.
The measures he takes include creating a free health service funded by the money that is currently wasted on frivolous law suits against doctors, removing the right to plead not guilty to a crime that you have been caught on camera committing, and making criminals pay for the food and accommodation they receive in prison – a move that may seem marginally less absurd than the UK asking the wrongly convicted to pay for their own time in detention.
In righting what he sees as the wrongs of modern day America he wins support not only from his own constituents but also from other parts of the country as people flock to move to the state and sample the new world. These include Danny and Sarah, a couple who lost their unborn baby when an armed robber turned up at the wrong house, and one of the two newsreaders who have been covering what’s going right in Rhode Island and what is going wrong elsewhere.
While the young, all female cast, through themselves into the story with real conviction, bringing all of the characters to vivid comic life, it’s hard to tell the point at which Thelen sees McGruder’s world as switching from Utopia to Dystopia. Our sympathy with Danny and Sarah is balanced against Danny’s wish to give his unborn child an expletive or a noise for their name, and while some of McGruder’s ideas are clearly ridiculous, others seem to have at least an honest and worthwhile motive behind them. It’s unclear if he is condemning the lack of morality he sees in much of American society, arguing about the dangers of trying to regulate even the most extreme examples of ignorance and stupidity, or trying to do both of these and more.
The end result is a play that has some great set-pieces, combining pinpoint humour with telling observations and performances that stay just the right side of caricature to make them all the more satirical, but never really comes together as a cohesive whole.
Runs until 11 August 2023 | Image: Contributed
The Reviews Hub Score
Funny but flawed
