Last night I attended a performance of “In the Wind” at the Tricklock theatre. The play was written by my best friend’s ex-boyfriend whom I don’t care for at all. I was concerned that the play might actually be good and I would have to rise to the occasion and admit this fact. But this proved to be not the case.
“In the Wind” follows the meagre existence of a family living in the bomb shelter-like remains of their home. The world has been overrun by an alien dictatorship which has transformed society into the generic Orwellian dystopia that we all apparently fear. We never see the aliens or learn why they have modelled human society after the bleak apocalypses of “Brave New World” and “1984.” But we hear them from time to time, or at least we hear some kind of monsters prowling about in the wind whipped wastes outside of the hovel.
The husband and wife, along with their daughter-in-law, struggle to eke out an existence. They subsist on rationed food, maintain a bicycle-powered generator to provide light, and generally cower in the paranoid shadow of the new regime. They are bouyed by idealistic memories of their son who escaped and is now presumably a leader in the resistance. When they hear word of an upcoming push by the resistance, they plan their escape.
Other than a scene of torture via electroshock, there isn’t much else to the story. Just before their planned escape, who should show up at their door but their long lost son, now transformed into a kind of gestapo enforcer. He kills his father and then is strangled himself by his mother. Then the play ends.
What is to be made of all this? Is the message here to trust no one, not even your family? If the world should fall under the sway of alien invaders, is it best just to surrender your humanity and fall into step? I had no sense of what I was meant to learn from the story, if anything. By the end of the play, the marginally-sympathetic characters were either dead or reduced to near helplessness.
Only the acting prowess of the Tricklock company and the audio/video engineering made this play watchable. Even so, Joe Pesce, the actor playing the father, seemed almost too spirit-crushed and tired, as though he felt the play tedious. The actor playing the son (I forget the names now) was the only one who seemed to truly slip into his role.
The final line of the play, delivered by the mother standing over her strangled son, was “Let’s go!” I thought it good advice, so I went.