There’s real-life truth and
there’s theatrical truth, and in Jon Kern’s
ever-darkening comedy, Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want to Kill
Us and How We Learn to Love Them (we’ll just call it MT from here on, shall we?) the line blurs discomfitingly. Now if you wish to avoid spoilers, I’ll get
some basic info and production particulars out of the way first. MT is
indeed a play about terrorists, Muslim terrorists at that, planning a symbolic
and high profile attack to occur in the Empire State Building in a post-9/11
world. They are the leader, African Muslim Qala (William Jackson Harper);
his female assistant, Arab Muslim Yalda (Nitya Vidyasagar); and their designated martyr, the willing and
oddly guileless Star Wars fan, Rahim (Utkarsh Ambudkar). Clowns in the way that only zealots can be, they
plan and prepare from a cheap two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, tending to
screw up over stupid details. Intruding and eventually insinuating into the
picture is their upstairs neighbor, a young, white stoner named Jerome (Steven
Boyer).
Most
of the audience finds the show pretty funny along the way—it may be worth noting, the author is currently a staff writer on The Simpsons—and under the
direction of Peter DuBois, the comedy is delivered in the best way such comedy can
be delivered: played low-key, realistically and for real stakes.
Never a false move or a wink to the audience. And that’s all good. But some experience an unpleasant
aftertaste nonetheless.
You
who wish to avoid spoilers—go now. You who will continue reading; I won’t
spoil that much, yet I will spill something that risks coloring how you
approach the play. Or if. So everybody have one list think before reading on.
If
you’re committed to continue—here we go:
Comedy
though it may be, MT is stll about
terrorists. Clowns though its characters may be, they are still intended
murderers. Kern doesn’t romanticize them. Or the kind of fates that inevitably
befall them.
Here,
though, is where the line between real life and theatrical truth gets drawn.
He
doesn’t present his characters with dispassionate disdain, as, say, Joe Orton
did in his black comedies. No, Kern
seems to like his characters, even “respect” them insofar as he makes them
human, funny, sad and capable of eliciting empathy. So the audience starts to
bond with them.
And
come that moment when Kern’s play says—implicitly—Why did you
think bad things wouldn’t happen just because my characters are clowns?
Terrorists are always clowns. And
they are always also human [read that
subtitle again folks]. That is my point—there is a gasp from the audience. For some of them it is a gasp
of betrayal.
Real
truth is: bad things happen to terrorists. Theatrical truth is: an author makes
a pact with an audience by creating a mood, a tone and an expectation based on “permissions”
he establishes at the top of the play. And while it stretches my premise to say
that Kern gives you no warning clues at all, they’re rendered minor and
perfunctory next to the delineation in which he makes the characters weirdly
lovable. And then he violates the pact; the ending seems like something out of
a very different, even darker comedy. Or drama. And it seems unnecessary; as if
he’s nailing home a point just to make sure we didn’t miss its milder
manifestation earlier. As if by finding these fictional characters weirdly
almost adorable, we ourselves would condone what they’re about. As if taking us
to task for being seduced, the way they themselves have been seduced into
fanaticism.
And
it will, I think, keep MT from finding a
wider, more appreciative audience. Because, mark my words, Mustafateers: it
doesn’t matter how groovy a play is almost until the end. If it violates the
understanding it has established, it not only hurts characters for whom the
audience has suspended enough disbelief to feel affection; it makes the
audience feel a little foolish for having expended the energy, for having
bought into a disingenuous bill of goods. (You can hear it in the curtain call
applause at MT; there’s a certain
enthusiasm for the actors, but it comes with effort, through a sense of drained
energy. Generally a comedy that makes an audience laugh that much has no trouble getting an explosive
hand—pun intended).
And
not a play on earth, no matter how good or well-done, ever recovers from that.
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