British playwright Sarah Kane’s “Blasted” is dark. This bears repeating, not to warn you off seeing the play, but as a critic’s version of due diligence.
This existentially fraught drama — on stage at Benchmark Theatre — is dark.
Given news of the world, you may want to factor that into your entertainment choices. There is sexual assault, and no small measure of racist, misogynist and homophobic slurs. And although one of the characters uses the word “love,” it’s hard to locate that emotion anywhere in the one act. And yet Benchmark’s production of the abrasive work set in some sort of wartime, reviled by critics at its premiere in 1995 and subsequently praised — with its bold direction and bolder performances — is a cause for, if not joy, celebration.
Before Benchmark took over its intimate space just north of Colfax in Lakewood, it was home to the Edge Theatre. Edge’s productions were strong and keen in their way. Under artistic director Neil Truglio, Benchmark has whetted that edge, producing difficult, often new shows that can be formally challenging (though more often their uneasiness has to do with subject matter). This three-character, claustrophobic play, which finds Cate (Helen Wheelock), Ian (Josh Levy) and Soldier (Jayce Johnson) in a single hotel room is even an artistic stretch for them.
When Cate walks into a lux hotel room, she oohs and aahs. In short order, Ian (of the many, many epithets) comes through the door. It takes a few exchanges to piece together what the two mean to each other. It’ll take much longer to figure out what to make of this rendezvous.
His banter is often unkind. He calls her stupid, slow and worse.
A phone call disrupts their conversation. Ian looks for a notebook, sits down and starts dictating a story to the listener on the other end of the call. It’s about a horrific crime “A serial killer slaughtered British tourist Samantha Scrace S-C-R-A-C-E, in a sick murder ritual comma … .”
They’re exes, although he’s apparently planned a rekindling. There is champagne on ice, flowers in a vase. She’s not interested. She came, she tells him, because he “sounded unhappy.” Cate’s stance doesn’t preclude sex, which may or may not count as a rape. (There will be another assault that is unambiguous.)
He’s ill. He’s lost a lung to smoking and is anticipating his demise. His hacking cough can be heard from the bathroom. And as convulsive as it is, it can’t match Cate’s laughing fits for disquieting. One of her spasms comes when Ian drops trou, his bare hiney to the audience, and asks her to touch him. Ouch.
We learn he’s got an ex and a son; she’s taking care of her mother and has a brother with a learning disability. Their dialogue suggests the fervid disconnect of two profoundly lonely souls. The two often talk at cross purposes. Think brutal Beckett but without the grace of the grand experimenter’s wordplay. (The play’s writer, Kane, might have even achieved some of that poetic power had she not taken her life in 1999 at the age of 28.) A grim tableau at the very end of the play even feels like a nod to Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” with floorboards taking the place of a mound of dirt.
The production design (by Paul Christian Edris) is taut. Lighting choices (by Brett Maughan) deftly keep the worst in the kind of shadow that nevertheless leaves little confusion about the brutality taking place.
What was ugly becomes horrific when Soldier arrives. Through much of the play, the TV has been quietly droning on about warfare. Now it’s in the room, hungry for food, for sex, for confession — although not absolution. Cate has escaped (though she’ll return), which leaves Ian and Soldier facing off.
By play’s end, that room will be a shambles. Explosions have cracked the screen of the TV hanging on a wall delivering news of the war in Ukraine. But the wreckage is also emotional. It is the stuff of trauma, of blowback, of extreme loneliness and of a soldier seeking his comeuppance for wartime deeds.
Soldier’s actions were so atrocious (think crimes against humanity but with the physical intimacy of soldiers brutalizing civilians) that Ian, a journalist accustomed to covering serial murder, rejects them as the kind of stories no one would be interested in.
“Blasted” might be the kind of play that no one would be interested in. The audience’s empathy will likely be in short supply; even Cate challenges sympathy. Kane leaned into the abyss of war and wrenched a tale of existential woe. And director Truglio and his cast are all in. Levy has worked with Benchmark once before. Wheelock and Johnson are new. Each is a revelation.
The drama is not without an amusing moment or two. Even so, the wittiest gesture isn’t the play’s but Benchmark’s. The theater company placed a QR scannable program in the kind of sleeve that holds a hotel card key. Yes, we are implicated no matter how repelled we are.
Truglio, so good with actors and sound design — and drawn to intentionally disorienting lighting design — brings together these gifts to make a startling work that looks like nothing we’ve seen. Indeed, you may want to unsee it, but the production won’t allow for that.
IF YOU GO
“Blasted”: Written by Sarah Kane. Directed by Neil Truglio. Featuring Hillary Wheelock, Josh Levy and Jayce Johnson. At Benchmark Theatre, 1560 Teller St., Lakewood. Through Nov. 11. For tickets and info, go to benchmarktheatre.com.
