Into the Breach, Out of the Chaos: ‘Beast’ and ‘Anger/Nation’

The wooden boxes that litter the set of “Beast,” Michael Weller’s muddled picaresque, are both instantly familiar and jarringly unusual. Long and wide enough to comfortably house bulked-up young men and women, they are draped in the stars and stripes of the American flag, with unobtrusive handles that make it easier to hoist them on and off airplanes and into the ground.They are military coffins, the seemingly inevitable reminders of the war dead. Current American policy has relegated them so far to the margins, and the very sight of these half-dozen boxes (designed with brutal simplicity by Eugene Lee) is startling. Arrayed in the shape of tables, beds, and trees, they take on the abstract potency of a Jasper Johns painting; assembled into a six-coffin-wide formation, as director Jo Bonney does in the play’s final scene, they conjure thoughts of a nation built out of mangled corpses.Unfortunately, they are also the most understated element of Mr. Weller’s stylistic mishmash, stuffed as it is with irredeemably silly stereotypes and a forced attempt at shock-value topicality. The first scene culminates in the image of a horribly disfigured young man, Sgt. Benjamin “Voych” Voychevsky (Corey Stoll), lumbering out of his coffin. “Back here no one wants us,” he announces, “not even death.” Voych can walk (stiffly) and talk (boomingly) but is impervious to pain and no longer eats or sleeps. He’s certainly not alive, but he’s not exactly dead, and “Beast” — the first of two new plays this season by Mr. Weller — occupies a similarly uncomfortable state. Part jeremiad, part black comedy, part tribute to America’s fallen soldiers, it lurches among genres with a discomfort rare to the playwright, who memorably charted the curdled idealism of an earlier war-crippled generation in the 1960s-set “Moonchildren” and “Loose Ends.”Joined by the hotheaded Private First Class James “Jimmy” Cato (Logan Marshall-Green), who was also badly wounded in Iraq, Voych embarks on a new tour of duty: a meandering, intermittently violent trek from a German hospital to “just about every place but somewhere” in America. They first stop in to visit Voych’s “widow” (Lisa Joyce, delivering the evening’s most grounded performance), and a fateful stopover at Mt. Rushmore spurs them to drop in on a certain civilian leader hunkered down in Crawford, Texas (Dan Butler, who just barely skirts caricature). This last trip drives home Mr. Weller’s point as Jimmy and Voych lobby for a ghoulish acknowledgement of their sacrifices.Ms. Bonney, no stranger to testosterone-soaked verbiage (she has numerous Neil LaBute and Eric Bogosian plays under her belt), and her two empathic young actors do what they can to give “Beast” a tone that will accommodate all of its discordant themes. Mr. Marhsall-Green’s agitated vitriol plays well off of Mr. Stoll’s galumphing melancholy, and the two seem up for just about everything the playwright throws at them. But as the clearly aggrieved Mr. Weller would undoubtedly agree, the mere fact that a pair of young men are up for a battle is hardly enough of a recommendation to throw them into it.* * *If the earnest gang at Theatreworks, a troupe famous for touring elementary schools with staged biographies along the lines of “Young Thurgood Marshall,” were to break into the Wooster Group’s premises and throw a keg party, the result might be something like the first hour of “Anger/Nation.”This latest exercise in cerebral chaos by the hell-for-leather Brooklyn troupe Radiohole purports to be a mash-up of Kenneth Anger (celebrated pioneer of homoerotic art films) and Carrie A. Nation (axe-wielding temperance proponent), but the first two-thirds is a lollapalooza of sound distortions, pendulous scrotums, ritualized air-rifle fusillades, eye-catching video animation and, for the audience, generous portions of free beer. Nation (Maggie Hoffman) is a central figure, threatening a trio of hirsute louts (Eric Dyer, Scott Halvorsen Gillette, and Iver Findlay) with symbolic castration, but the Anger references are confined largely to a handful of ornate tableaux lifted from his head-trip opus “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.” It’s all very loud and thematically complex and just about out of control and not particularly edifying. But then something strange happens, even by Radiohole’s goonhouse standards. The show appears to end abruptly, the four actors take a quick bow, and then two of the men take seats on the fully lit stage to engage in a seemingly typical post-show talkback. Mr. Dyer is solicitous; Mr. Gillette is alternately tormented and hostile. (This being Radiohole, Mr. Gillette’s lower half remains exposed all the while.)But this guarded meta-commentary about transcending one’s “libidinal” impulses and the impermanence of art in a technological era is just as scripted as — and even more riveting than — what came before. A few audience members trickle out; several others sidle back down to the stage for another beer. What began as children’s theater on a bender has morphed slyly, subversively into Andy Kaufman with a degree in semiotics. Like its bluenosed protagonist, Radiohole turns the buzz kill into an act of noble exploration.“Beast” until October 12 (79 E. 4th St., between Second Avenue and Bowery, 212-239-6200).“Anger/Nation” until September 27 (512 W. 19th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-560-8912).

Into the Breach, Out of the Chaos: ‘Beast’ and ‘Anger/Nation’

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