Theatre in Review: Blood Play (Public Theater/Under the Radar Festival)"Never mix, never worry." The characters in Blood Play would do well to heed this maxim, offered unforgettably by Honey, the soused academic wife in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Such a warning would probably fall on deaf ears, anyway, as they lap up one wild concoction after another with names like Piccadilly and Robin Red Breast, each one more vividly hued than its predecessors. The authors, Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, are cocktail artists themselves; they've rounded up two Jewish married couples, thrown in a melancholy Gentile single guy, added all sorts of embarrassing behavior, and stirred it all up into a long tall drink of black comedy. Adding a dash of bitters is Ira, the son of the host couple, a tormented adolescent who simmers outside in his pup tent, spinning violent fantasies and meditating on the Holocaust. When it comes to surface matters, Blood Play is a vividly realized snapshot of life in the Chicago suburbs sometime after the Korean War -- that is, if Norman Rockwell and Diane Arbus had teamed up to take the picture. Laura Jellinek's setting -- a basement recreation room, complete with knotty pine walls, a built-in bar (with enough liquor to sink a battleship), a dropped ceiling, and "clever" knickknacks like the Chinese checkers board hanging on the wall -- is a first-rate depiction of suburban hell. Similarly, Sydney Maresca's costumes -- especially the flared skirts and dressily casual men's clothes -- are accurate right down to the last tie clip. For reasons of the plot, one couple, on their way to a costume square dance, is clad in cow outfits -- the husband's suit has a set of pink udders on his chest -- and even these ridiculous getups are done with real attention to detail. Everything else -- the silly jokes, the sillier games (in one, enigmatically titled "Grandfather Clock," two men cross the room with large potatoes dangling around their waists), and the increasingly boozy atmosphere -- all feels perfect, as does the social chit-chat under which all sorts of racism, snobbery, intimations of wartime horrors, and garden-variety cruelty can be detected. So realistic is the action that you start to wonder if these young artists -- members of the Brooklyn-based theatre company The Debate Society -- aren't in possession of a time machine with which to do their research. In the end, however, surfaces are all Blood Play has to offer. Even given its short running time of 75 minutes or so, one's admiration for the company's acute social anthropology wanes as it becomes increasingly clear that nothing is going to happen. The many hints of unease in this engineered paradise are just that -- hints and nothing more; various points are raised, then quickly dropped as the next round of drinks is served. One major revelation -- of a shockingly violent act committed by one of the couples' sons -- is quickly followed by another party game. And when, in a fine coup de théâtre, the action shifts from adult amusements in the basement to the pup tent outdoors, where the troubled Ira is allowed to bare his rage, the scene amounts to a giant anticlimax. (It is, basically, an account of what Ira has been doing -- which is essentially nothing -- while we've been watching the grown-ups drunkenly cavort.) In the end, Blood Play isn't a play at all; it's closer to portraiture than drama, and its stasis quickly becomes enervating. This is one of those awkward pieces that, as it moves to blackout, leaves the audience wondering if the show is really over. What's most distressing about Blood Play is that the clearly gifted members of this company don't seem to realize that they are looking for gold in a vein that has been stripped bare by hundreds of playwrights, ranging from Edward Albee to Bruce Norris -- and those are just the playwrights. (The Midwestern accents and carefully concealed racism reminded me at times of the far-more-interesting Clybourne Park.) Do Bos, Thureen, and the others really think there is anything fresh to say about the stultifying life of midcentury Middle America? Did somebody give them a full set of Mad Men DVDs? Are there really no new ideas? Is a breathless exposé of suburban mores really appropriate for the Under the Radar Festival, ostensibly devoted to artists on the cutting edge? It's all here -- hints the house is rotting, acts of female one-upmanship, the tremulous and probably violent younger generation -- and if you've seen it once, you've seen it a hundred times. And when it is over, the characters, aside from their swollen livers, are pretty much where they were when they started out. Actually, to call them characters is to overstate the matter -- they are cutouts of suburban types, admittedly rendered with rare precision by the entire cast. In a company of equals, the authors offer especially striking work: I was amused by the sight of Bos' Bev, who desperately wants to be a social success, sinking to the ground in despair as she contemplates the ruin of her upcoming ladies' lunch; Thureen is simply uncanny as Jeep, the gangly, socially awkward professional photographer whose sad smile hides any number of unhealed wounds, starting with a childhood case of polio. In addition, Mike Riggs' lighting captures both the warm party atmosphere and the chilling night outside. And the sound design, by Ben Truppin-Brown and M.L. Dogg, is a many-layered thing of wonder, blending a variety of disparate effects -- thunder, cicadas, flapping wings, and a hi-fi rendition of the "Cow-Cow Boogie" -- into a soundscape of trouble brewing. One of the games played by the characters is called "Paper Bag Dramatics," and I'm afraid that's what Blood Play has to offer. Its main effect was to make me want to have a cocktail.-- David Barbour 
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