Long Night of the American Dream

Concrete Drops Theatre—Alloway Hall – Manitoba Museum

This play, like Waiting for Godot, goes in circles and the plot, if there is one, is muddled and takes the form of an ongoing argument between two brothers about the play itself and each other’s roles and failures. The alleged play never happens, unless what we are experiencing IS the play, which seems more likely after one of them finds a manuscript about two brothers having an ongoing argument about a play which they are meant to be following. It’s like being in a chamber of mirrors. You’re not sure if what the actors are saying is what they are saying as actors discussing the play they are about to perform, or it is part of the newly discovered script they are now following. In fact they don’t seem to know themselves. This weird uncertainty, and the brothers’ sibling rivalry leads to a lot of dark humour and lots of laughs. But references to the divisions within American society start sneaking into the back-and-forth between the brothers, topics like immigration, abortion, guns, and contested elections. The brothers start to resemble the irreconcilable poles of American society. They sort of reconcile at the end, but not really, which seems to be the point.

Throughout, the actors are amazingly able to maintain our uncertainty about whether they are actually acting in a play, or not. They tease the audience with pregnant pauses which falsely promise a return to an actual script and theatre norms, which never happens. In the end we have to accept that what we have witnessed is a play, the essence of which is a glancing critique of American society. And as in Sartre’s No Exit, it suggests that Americans have made their own kind of hell.

Jeremy Hull