The Great Escape
Martin Denton · June 17, 2004

Is The Great Escape—rising young playwright Matt Freeman's first foray into theatre of the absurd—actually an allegory about GenNext life under George W. Bush?

I think that's one way to read this unsettling, funny, and smart new play. It's about two adult children who return to their childhood home after their mother's remarriage, only to end up trapped in her living room inside a pair of burlap sacks.

There are certainly other possible interpretations: The Great Escape is exciting because it's packed with rich ideas and terrific writing; it's being presented off-off-Broadway by the always-interesting Blue Coyote Theatre Group in a polished and well-nourished mounting under the direction of Kyle Ancowitz; it pretty much demands your attention.

At the center of The Great Escape is young man named Henry, who has been away from home for a long while without actually making a new home for himself somewhere else. He skipped his mother's recent wedding to a man named Walter because, quite clearly, he couldn't bear to witness it; now he's come for a short visit and it's going disastrously badly. After an (unseen) cataclysmic blow-up, his mother has locked herself in her room; or, to put it more accurately, she's locked Henry out. He's in trouble; he's in pain; he's horribly stuck.

The Great Escape is about, mostly, what Henry wants. For most of the play, he says he wants to live "the Happy Life of Well-Meaning People" (a brilliantly pathetic statement of compromised vision, don't you think?). After he and his sister Catherine conspire to kidnap their mother and hold her hostage in her own living room, he becomes more articulate: "I demand retribution for the sins perpetrated on my family during the Middle Passage," he begins; and then the floodgates are opened. Pent-up impotencies and impossibilities fall out of him in torrents in a spectacularly cathartic monologue:

I demand the heads of the foreign generals [he continues], assurances for the state department, representation without taxation, and an end to crony-ism. I demand nuclear proliferation, coupled with increased military spending. I demand a Department of War.

And later:

I demand rest, at last, in the bunk bed I grew up in. Or for men to come and give me drugs and give me clothes with neutral colors so I never get upset. I demand the return of all borrowed books to my personal collection. A series of uncomfortable silences. I demand better access to health care and I demand that the man who cut me in line at the Deli be killed with his own baseball cap.

Freeman's writing is remarkably strong here—vivid and exact and astonishingly far-reaching. It's at this point that The Great Escape, on its surface a bitter comedy of rampant familial dysfunction, becomes a portrait of a generation that can't see its way out of the mire and muck that constitutes its inheritance.

It's also very funny, crafted with the same crackerjack precision that characterizes works by Beckett or Ionesco; like them, The Great Escape teeters on the border between the hilarious and the hysterical, where it's never clear if laughter or tears is the right response.

Ancowitz's production shrewdly grounds the play. There's a beautifully-realized naturalistic set by Paul Gelinas and realistic lighting by Dana Sterling; the only hint we get from the environment that things are askew comes from Margaret F. Heskin's weirdly off-kilter score, used sparingly and therefore effectively. Robert Buckwalter and Laura Desmond deliver exceptional performances as Henry and Catherine; I was less sure about Stephen Nisbet as Walter and Charlotte Patton as Henry and Catherine's mother Susan, neither of whom quite achieves the monolithic quality that their characters seem to require. (It should be noted that I attended the very first performance of The Great Escape, and that nuances of characterization may develop over time.)

The world we live in seems so big and scary these days; how are we to function when dysfunctionality is the norm? Tackling that fundamental question in a manner that is as entertaining as it is alarming and as provocative as it is provoking, The Great Escape proves to be must-see theatre.