A Lie of the Mind

On pg 38, Tonto meets Snoop-Dogg (please mentally add as many [sic]s as grammatically necessary): "You-- You a love. You-- You are only that. Only. You don' know. Only love. Good. You. Mother. You. Always love. Always. But he lies to me. Like I'm gone. Not here. Lies and tellz me iz for love. Iz not for love! Iz pride!"

It is dialogue like this which contributed to me taking a full month to read something which, if seen in the theatre, would have played out in two hours. I must conclude that attending a performance of this play would have felt like spending a full month in an uncomfortable seat.

You know those times in a movie where something is supposed to be sooper-serious and you can tell they wanted you to be really moved by something show more an actor says, but instead it makes you burst out laughing in disbelief of its corny melodrama? This is that line, copied exactly as it appears on pg 21: "HEEZ MY HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAART!!!" Yep, 2 capital E's, a capital Z, and no less than 16 capital A's (I counted-- twice). I wonder how long the author agonised over the potential dramatic differences between 15, 16, or 17 capital A's (or, hey, can we get some consistency here? Shouldn't "always" and "lies" in the passage above be spelled with Z's too?).

And finally, during what is no doubt expected to be a significant symbolic gesture/event (I can tell, since it was lifted right out of Chekhov's The Seagull), the author counts heavily on his audience being as dain bramaged as his sexy-sexy, oh-but-she's-a-slut-too-so-let's-have-her-beaten-nearly-to-death-by-her-suffering-husband character Beth, when her brother Mike comes in and dumps a full back half of a buck on the living room floor-- an animal he shot just minutes before-- and says he doesn't need to chop it up into dinner any time soon because, "It's frozen solid. Won't thaw out for hours yet" (pg 61). Well dang, if it's cold enough outside to freeze a large living animal solid within minutes after its death, ya gotta wonder how any part of Mike himself made it back to the house intact enough to tell us about it. (And good luck to the props people who take work on this play. I imagine the full back half of a solidly frozen buck is mighty heavy and papier-mâché isn't going to cut it any more than Mike wants to.)

Awful, stupid, and insulting to any degree of intelligence. Sam Shepard's two-time Oscar-winning wife, Jessica Lange, must have been giving Oscar-worthy performances the rest of us could not see every time she told him, "It's good, honey!" (or should that be, "IZ GOOD. HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNEE!!!"?) show less

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