Time to Burn
East-coast playwright Charles L. Mee has made a specialty of using classic texts as the basis for commentary on contemporary life. His Orestes, presented last year by Roadworks Productions, jumbled together Euripides’ tragicomedy with material appropriated from such sources as William S. Burroughs, Brett Easton Ellis, and women’s magazines to create a nihilistic satire on the media-saturated, morally drifting modern world. But here, inspired by Gorky’s 1902 portrait of derelicts and drifters in a Russian flophouse, Mee wants to exalt the human capacity for compassion and joy in the face of poverty and despair. Unfortunately, Time to Burn–like The Lower Depths, only more so–is undone by its schematic construction, which turns a tribe of social outcasts into a collection of archetypes voicing platitudes such as “Joy has something of the sacred in it,” “Of all human qualities the greatest is sympathy,” and “Life is such a mixed bag–hardly ever all good or all bad.” What for Gorky was a reflection of his bitter, battered life is for Mee an academic conceit about the eloquence of the alienated.
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Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo by Mihael Broslow.
