In the Heart of America
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Wallace winds the three skeins of her nonlinear story more and more tightly together as the play progresses. The core is the love affair between Remzi Saboura and Craver Perry, a Palestinian-American soldier and his redneck best friend from Kentucky, an affair set off by high-adrenaline violence. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Boxler, teaches them to hone the anger from their pasts to killing intensity; he also adds his own associations to the play’s death spiral. Boxler is haunted by the 1968 My Lai massacre, particularly by the ghost of Lue Ming, a Vietnamese girl tortured in that infamous attack on civilians. Goading all the characters into revelations of horror and love, she winds the third skein into the spiral: Remzi’s sister Fairouz limps through the collage of scenes searching for answers to her brother’s disappearance, her crippled foot and bitterness symbolic of the anti-Arab violence that continues in the United States.
This About Face production makes these interlocking stories compelling, building the tension of each conflict with crisp timing and careful attention to Wallace’s remarkable language. Kyle Hall and Steve Futterman are particularly skillful as Craver and Remzi, capturing the vicious eroticism of wartime lust but also offering a shadowy promise of the love that makes one soldier’s death particularly tragic.
The deceptively neutral surroundings become more menacing as the play goes on. In Geoff Curley’s simple, flexible set and Joel Moritz’s ingenious lighting design, rows of hanging lamps make the stage into an obstacle course, a battlefield strafed by bombs, and an interrogation room. A sandy-looking brown floor covered with netting implies both literal and metaphorical desert. Tented alcoves at the rear of the stage open to reveal brief tableaux and offer draped entrances and exits, as if the stage itself were hiding secrets.
