The NY Times review of Michael Weller's new play, "Beast," which opened Sept. 15 at the New York Theater Workshop:
Michael Weller approaches a painful subject from an unusual perspective in his new
play, “Beast,” a macabre drama about a badly maimed Iraq war veteran who embarks on a mysterious odyssey in search of acceptance and eventually
retribution.
The play, which opened on Monday night at New York Theater Workshop in a production directed by Jo Bonney, forsakes documentary realism — the staple aesthetic for much theater about the current conflict — in favor of something more adventurous but also more problematic. Bold in its conception and admirable (at least in theory) in its focus on seriously wounded war veterans, “Beast” mixes tones and styles uneasily as the soldier at its center is gradually revealed to be a sort of
avenging spirit caught between life and death.
Sgt. Benjamin Voychevsky (Corey Stoll), and his buddy Jimmy Cato (an increasingly good Logan Marshall-Green) are on their way home from a military hospital in ermany after being treated for injuries suffered in combat in Baghdad. Each has lost an arm, and Jimmy’s face is disfigured by scars. The more badly hurt Ben, whose entire head is covered in scar tissue (the realistic makeup is by Nathan Johnson), impulsively decides to delay the reunion with his wife and newborn baby.
Jimmy, still loyal to his officer, happily tags along, although Ben never makes clear the purpose of their “mission.” He himself doesn’t seem to know why he’s doing what he’s doing, only that he can’t sleep, doesn’t need to eat and hears gabbling voices in his head that urge him on toward some obscure fate.
Still in Germany, they seek help from a cynical, rapacious Army captain (pungently written, and portrayed with sharp-fanged humor by Dan Butler) who secretly deals arms to any and all buyers. The captain later suggests, a bit ludicrously, that Ben might be just the right star for a reality show some friends are cooking up, “Suburban Zombie.” Back in America, in a Motel 6 in Kansas, Jimmy and Ben arrange a date with two prostitutes — two blind prostitutes (their pimp appears to specialize in niche marketing to Iraq war veterans) — before Ben works up the courage to go home.
But his reunion with his wife, Bonnie Ann (Lisa Joyce), ends unhappily, and the men take to the road again. I am not sure whether Mr. Weller was aiming to write a variation on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” — the play’s (rather tasteless) title suggests that he might have been — but as with the creature brought into being by the title character of that novel, Ben’s violent impulses are eventually trained on the
man who could be said to have made him the way he is: George W. Bush. (He’s coyly called just G W in the script.) The play’s gruesome final scene is a confrontation between the soldiers and their smiling, smarmy commander in chief, incisively caricatured by Mr. Butler.
Mr. Weller, who has another play, “Fifty Words,” opening in New York this month, takes a lot of risks in fashioning this grimly comic finale, presumably inspired by outrage at the idea that the architects of war rarely have to suffer its most harrowing consequences. Mr. Weller’s sympathy for the soldiers and his antipathy to the Bush administration and its prosecution of the Iraq war are not hard to glean.
“I am here because strong people put me here — and weak ones went along,” G W boasts. “That’s the democratic way.”
But it seems a little brutal to make a wounded soldier the protagonist of your play and then deny him his humanity, in this case both literally and figuratively. Ben is presumably meant to be some sort of supernatural manifestation of the collective psyche of the soldiers who have suffered and died in the Iraq war. But a real man grappling with the painful challenges of reintegrating into society after enduring a terrible ordeal would more powerfully illustrate the cost of the war. Although he is played with quiet, existential anguish by Mr. Stoll, Ben is more a philosophical and dramatic device than a credible character.
“Jimmy, we don’t belong anywhere,” Ben says. But Mr. Weller need not have made his soldier an actual outcast from humanity to explore the sense of alienation that returning soldiers often feel, wounded or not. Fantasy can certainly be used to illuminate painful reality, but in “Beast” Mr. Weller ultimately offers more mystification than understanding.
