Coming of the Hurricane
This is the social subtext of Coming of the Hurricane, running in a gripping production at the Organic Touchstone Company. The second Glover script to play here this season–the author directed his own Thunder Knocking on the Door for Northlight last fall–was also only Glover’s second work as a playwright (it premiered in Denver in 1995). His inexperience shows a bit, in some self-consciously elegiac monologues and some heavy-handed dramaturgy at the climax. But Glover is a talented writer with an especially strong gift for verbal give-and-take; in one breathtaking passage, two men tell the story of an African boxer in rhythmically charged alternating phrases that accumulate a positively heroic lyrical force. Perhaps more important, Glover is also an actor (his credits range from regional productions of August Wilson’s Fences and Two Trains Running to TV police dramas) who has a powerful sense of the way character is shaped by past events and present desires. The people in Coming of the Hurricane are not–you should excuse the expression–black or white; they’re complex, flawed individuals who are simultaneously pathetic and comic, detestable and engaging; they rise and fall in pursuit of money, love, dignity, self-respect, power, and freedom, and we exult in their aspirations even as we recognize the inevitability of their doom.
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Lawrence Woshner, with his mountainous yet chiseled physique, makes the Hurricane a far more interesting figure than the racist brute one might expect: the character’s charismatic gallantry contrasts with Crixus’s blunt earthiness yet echoes the black boxer’s bone-deep sense of honor. In these men’s protracted climactic battle, excitingly staged by Scott Cummins, Glover depicts male combat as a force of nature even as he mourns the evils that created this terrible storm.
