Griller is the first of the three plays in this collection. It is set in a suburban backyard (on the forth of july) and it deals with the seemingly everlasting subject of a middle-class family in decay. All events are clouded in the smoke from the mixed grill that´s being processed in the background more or less all through the play. It deals in part with the two ever competing brothers, (one has, as it turns out, a drug problem, and the other with both marriage and success). Theres also the neighbour (vietnam vet) who keeps downing drinks (why shouldnt he?) and finally gets to say the truth about the failing , selfconscious, hypocrites around him. Basically it is a really wellwritten piece, and true to it´s cause, wich I guess is to scratch a little on the liberal, democratic surface of the american middle-class and see what´s lurking there in the suburban mud. But I´ve seen these kind of characters in too many different takes already and Bogosian doesnt seem to get beyond the common truth in or around them. I guess my parallell reading of Jonathan Franzen was´nt to Bogosians advantage in my case. Franzen explores these middle-class dilemmas more deeply than most, plus he has the novels length and width to do it in. So it put Bogosians play in a pretty unfortunate place for me; I seemed to be wanting it to be something else/more.
Humpty Dumpty is a kind of genremix; comic satire horror story of the failing/successful screenwriters, novelists and book editors that inhabit the play. They seek refuge from (themselves?) and their In-crowd arty New York lives in an upstate vacation home. Off course the longed for rest never comes, instead the professional/emotional rivalry between the husbands/wives grows quickly out of being something felt but not talked about, into high-pitched screams at each other. Their rescuer seems to be the native caretaker, an older man with feet on the ground and happily unknowing of the arty, symbolic, warfare that´s going on between the visitors in the isolated vacation home. Some kind of unknown catastrophe of epic proportions occurs (nuclear?) in the country, and their sort of intense vacation turns into a hunger game – quest for survival. The caretaker is their only hope and being given this new power-position is too much to handle for the down-to earth caretaker who´s had too much already! So a gun is produced and consequently has to go off. This set-up, with genre-mix and so on, is promising but as in Griller in reading it I wanted more to come from it all.
Red Angel – This teacher, student relation is probably the strongest piece in this collection. It´s the classic Pygmalion set up. Older, single(??),writer teacher meets younger female student who just wants to chat a little. So whats at stake here? Sex as both an opportunity to meet and get to know someone, and sex as a trap where you can´t go nowhere but far away from one another? There is again something in the set up here and how the drama between our lovers evolves that I just don´t seem to get. Something in the Male v.s Female power struggle and how it´s described leaves me with the boring dramaturgic question: what does he want to say with this? Young female students can be talented with a more dynamic, deeper and wider intellect than older male writer/teachers? Is this news? Still I guess the strength in the piece lies in what could be argued as the “victory of realism”. The characters are more convincing than in the other two plays, but then again the set-up and events in this play is weaker than in Humpty Dumpty for instance… Altogether the three play left me with a feeling of wanting to have read something else. I had higher expectations I guess. ( )