Playwright: June Havoc
At: Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway
Phone: 773-528-9696; $20
Runs through: Oct. 28
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Nowadays, we associate ‘marathons’ with charitable causes, the participants being amateur athletes cheered on by friends and family. But in times of unrest and upheaval, audiences demand more stirring amusement. Public executions being no longer in vogue, lurid crimes less frequent and natural disasters more preventable, we saw the advent of entertainments providing spectators the guilty thrill of seeing people just like themselves engaging in heroic acts of superhuman endurance. Witness the popularity of ‘reality shows’ featuring common citizens lending a veneer of credence to scenarios replete with artificially-contrived crises.
Both June Havoc and Horace McCoy witnessed firsthand the dance marathons that offered Depression-era Americans the opportunity to vicariously share in the likewise carefully-scripted fortunes of ‘people worse off than they are.’ But while the literary tidiness of McCoy’s 1935 novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, is apparent, Havoc’s 1964 play is narrated in the manner of dispatches from the front lines, its images as searingly raw as they are indiscriminate.
Her reconnaissance report includes some of the elements we expect from this genre: the pregnant wife; the wisecracking sailor; the vaudeville hoofers and singing cowboys hoping to catch the eyes of talent agents; and the agonizing ‘sprints’ and ‘grinds.’ But none of the contestants, including the couples who marry in foxtrot rhythm for the donated wedding presents and the promoter who supplies them annulments following the ceremonies, is any more venal than required by the illusion they promulgate (the villain’s role assigned to the gangsters likewise economically hobbled by the repeal of Prohibition). Even our hero and heroine—a cynical college-man turned shill and a former child star still optimistic as Orphan Annie—emerge as blameless, if hardly untarnished, innocents.
Shade Murray’s direction cannot wholly focus our comprehension of the text’s meandering progress, given the obstructive sight-lines engendered by the physical proximity of 31 actors on a loft stage measuring no more than 30 by 20 feet, maximum. But so vivid are the individual personalities and so visceral the emotional conflict arising from the kaleidoscopic melee unfolding barely a footstep away from us, that never for an instant do we pause to speculate on the motives behind our own enjoyment of simulated excruciation as spectacle.