subUrbia -- Bogosian

Earlier this year (July I guess), I had the opportunity to watch Eric Bogosian's subUrbia.  Now many, many years ago I had a chance to see it.  Most likely this would have been late 90s in Chicago, and it didn't strike me as all that compelling -- or perhaps it was that the reviews were lukewarm.  Not really sure.  This might have been the Chicago premiere.  I had enjoyed Talk Radio but wasn't a huge, huge fan of Bogosian.

Anyway, with quite a few years under the bridge, I decided this time around I was interested in going.  Probably one factor is the relative paucity of good theatre here in Vancouver, so you tend to take what you can get ...

Entering the theatre, I was struck by how the company was really going all out to capture the mood.  (The company -- Ninja Pirates Theatre -- does not currently have an active or at least open website, but I will try to update that down the road if it changes.)  The set was the outside of a mini mart, like a 7-11 and you could see a bit of the parking lot and the dumpster in the back.  When the light is on, you can see a bit of the inside of the store. There was even a payphone connected to the side of the building.  This took me back immediately.  It's not that I really hung out that much at the 7-11 or even walked over there that much as a teenager, but it felt like the kind of place that I could have hung out at in the 80s.  On a different note, I have occasionally thought about memorializing the 7-11 on Belmont Ave. in Chicago in a piece of fiction, perhaps with aliens landing in the relatively spacious parking lot (pretty rare for that stretch of Belmont).  The kids that hang out there (at least when I had a chance to observe them in the 90s) were a bit older and generally postpunk.  In fact, though they are more 90s characters, they have a lot in common with the losers that are in Bogosian's script (out of high school, maybe a year or two of community college, little ambition, shitty jobs).  Anyway, the payphone was kind of the clincher, since even in the early 90s, payphones were still essential because everyone had beepers and few had cell phones.  I guess the switch among youngsters was late 90s.  I think even the 7-11 on Belmont has finally gotten rid of its outdoor payphone, though it had one for a long, long time after they started disappearing everywhere else.

The music selected was also quite good, though I don't recall many of the actual songs -- some Nine Inch Nails for sure.  It's a little hard to tell from internal evidence just exactly when this is set (and this may be my next blog post), but probably 1989 or 1990.  (The play was actually first produced in 1994.)  Anyway, the main character (Jeff) starts off by coming across as a liberal mouth piece: he sticks up for the Indian store owner as well as tells his gang of friends not to make fun of homosexuals either.  It seems that he is going to be the person that the typical audience member relates to, but Bogosian is a bit trickier than that.  Jeff kind of goes into this existential rant about how fucked up things are, and this resonated deeply with me, since my very dark world view does stem from thinking that Reagan was going to launch missiles at the U.S.S.R. any day.  I truly thought it was likely (and Kalamazoo was exactly halfway between Chicago and Detroit, so it was somewhere in the third tier of targets for Soviet missiles -- on top of everything else taking out Kalamazoo would disrupt the hordes of folks fleeing either city and taking I-94).  As unreasonable as this is to me now, it deeply colored my childhood and my resulting worldview.  While nuclear war is pretty remote now of course, there are plenty of more tangible and realistic problems facing the world now that worry me.  I guess once a Cassandra, always a Cassandra.  Still, it strikes me that the environmental crises are real and the pessimists are going to be right in the end.

About the only think that was missing from his rant was South Africa, which I thought would have ranked a bit higher from someone who was supposed to be sensitive and tuned into world events (unlike his drop-out friends).  Where I am having trouble is that I am looking over the published script, but it was heavily revised and basically reset to the late 90s, so I can't tell what was on stage (where they were using the original script).  It kind of pisses me off actually.  I think it was a terrible idea to reset the script.

Later it becomes clear that Jeff is a small-town guy, lacking in gumption and who tries to derail the dreams of his artist-girlfriend, Sooze (she wants to move to NYC).  And he is revealed to have relatively little spine in other matters.  I found this pretty annoying, to be honest, that Bogosian is really setting up the audience to have to disassociate themselves from this character, when it is pretty clear he is ostensibly set up as the moral compass of the play.  I suppose Bogosian is making a larger point about liberal-leaning people who then don't or can't "walk the walk," but it still annoyed me.  A guy who was a bit of an outcast, but who has made it big as an indie rock star, turns up and turns everyone's lives upside down.  Jeff in particular starts to look smaller and smaller as his jealousy rages out of control.  Basically no one escapes Bogosian's critical attention, though the rock star and Sooze come across as the least hypocritical.

I will give Bogosian some minor credit in that he introduces not just one, but two guns, into the play -- and neither go off (apologies to Chekhov), despite a couple of stand-offs (involving the Indian store owner, his sister and Tim -- a very messed up Army veteran).  I wasn't totally sold on the ending, which was a bit cliched in a different way, but it did avoid the cliche of a shoot-out, which was where the play seemed to be heading.  Interestingly, Bogosian added a few lines for the Indian clerk's sister at the end, and I did like those, but I disliked all the other changes he made, which only muddied the water for me.  The mid 90s (Bush into Clinton years) and even moreso the late 90s just didn't merit the same kind of existential dread as the late 80s, and I think it messes up the effect of Jeff's speeches.  At one point, one of the characters now has a cell phone but other folks still are using the payphone (and there may even be a beeper involved).  And Jeff is now ranting about iPods rather than Walkmen players.  So the time frame slips all over the place.  Everything is just all scrambled now, and it comes across as a really sloppy revision.  And quite unnecessary frankly (aside perhaps for the extra lines for the Indian clerk's sister, which seem to work). 

Obviously, I am glad that Ninja Pirates decided to go with the original script.  They really did throw themselves into the roles and got a lot of the feel right.  I was hit with a huge wave of nostalgia, since I knew kids (that hung out at the back of the classroom) that basically had limited ambitions and didn't seem to make much of themselves after high school.  I was never part of that crowd, but I could see how Bogosian had really captured them, and the era as well (at least in the original version that I watched).  In a lot of ways, I wouldn't want to return to that era (late 80s).  I guess I wouldn't mind returning to 1995, especially if I could be 25 again (probably my personal high water mark).  But I was definitely sucked into the past and thrashed around there for what seemed like a week after subUrbia.  Don't regret going to see the play, however.