For a while it seemed to me very
much as if Intimacy by Thomas Bradshaw was
just another example of New Group artistic
director Scott Elliot’s fascination with plays that explore and
at times giddily seem to celebrate moral depravity and the human spirit at its
least noble, but enough people who had seen it before I attended told me they
were glad to have hung on for Act Two, that I felt a weird justification for a
prurient curiosity I would not normally have had in such a context. This
context including cum-squirting penises (oh yes, and the special effects and
imitation tools seem more than real enough), the depiction of a husband taking
an extravagantly noisy dump in a manner that is unabashed and specific, if not
quite as visually illustrative (we don’t see his bowel movement, but he does
call his wife in to have a look because he’s worried about the color) and the
graphic depictions of all kinds of things—seemingly toward the point of
pulling the veil off the “intimacy” of the title and showing just how far deep
familiarity can let people who live together go.
But
in the second act, what Bradshaw has in mind becomes clear. He’s intending a
Joe-Orton style dark-comedy-cum-farce (with actual cum) in which normal
societal restrictions and taboos are systematically broken down to a point
where everybody accepts everything, culminating in a community porn film
featuring all the members (pun intended) of three family households, parents
and late-teen/young-adult offspring included. And nothing wrong with that as a
comic target for a satire on societal standards and double standards. But here
are the problems.
•
Bradshaw doesn’t know how to set up his permissions. It’s okay for him to save
a plot reveal for the second act, but
he’s also—and I think unwittingly, because the craft isn’t in his current
toolkit—keeping from the audience the prism through which to view all the
shenanigans; so for the longest time it just seems like bullshit shock for
bullshit shock’s sake, and generates many intermission walkouts.
•
Bradshaw simply doesn’t write funny enough dialogue. Social is a hard genre
anyway because contemporary mores change, making them a constantly moving
target. And while Joe Orton’s stuff provides a solid template, to be sure, the
material itself hasn’t aged well. But it still generates a few laughs when done right, because he makes it clear,
right from the beginning, what kind of ride we’re signing up for. By contrast,
on a basic level, Bradshaw doesn’t make it clear we’re supposed to be watching
a quite-literally balls-out comedy. And by the time we realize it—after
the intermission—it’s way too late.
•
Director Scott Elliott has no gift for comedy. Never has. Doesn’t know how to
direct it, pace it, time it, cast for it. His gift is for a kind of
claustrophobic realism which is a stylistic enemy of comedy. \
(*Sigh*)
All those ejaculations for naught…