Word: emma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WESLEY IS PISSING on his sister's 4-H diagrams of how to carve a broiled chicken. Emma, in a fit of anger, throws empty tin cans at the farmhouse because her mother took the broiler out of the freezer and ate it. Their father, Weston, came home drunk last night and broke down the front door. Ella, the mother, stands wearily in the kitchen and wonders, "What kind of a family is this...
...SOMETHING in this family binds it together in its distress--a love beneath childlike dreams of baseball and airplanes, the roughhousing and wristwrestling. The "liquid dynamite" in Weston's veins flows for Wesley and Emma also, and they lash out furiously against the invaders threatening the simple foundation of their lives. The system must prevail, however, and in this big, barren land it often does so brutally...
...outlandish dramatic style requires deeply emotional acting which the Reality's company fortunately delivers. As Emma, Kathleen Patrick brims with the newly-found sexual energy (she is in the midst of her first period) of a frustrated 4-H girl who wants to be an auto mechanic in Baja California. Patrick displays exquisite timing and movement in this portrait of innocence giving way to restlessness--her soliloquy to the empty refrigerator rings both poignant and hilarious...
Chris McCann, fresh from the New York production of Buried Child, gives perhaps the most surrealistic performance as Emma's older brother Wesley. With stylized actions and loose-hung posture, McCann shows a simple-minded soul whose childishness belies his age and size. All that matters for Wesley are his baseball dreams and the pungent smells and sounds of the Western life. By the end, as Wesley dons his father's clothes and habits, it is clear that the curse passes on from one generation to the next...
...than any other major modern playwright. When they do appear, they are almost invariably presented as mothers or whores. In his superbly crafted and deeply felt The Homecoming, he merged both roles in the sibylline central figure of Ruth. In that sense Betrayal is a dramatically interesting departure, for Emma is not really a mother/whore character. It is also a mettlesome test for Blythe Danner, who is one of the most formidably gifted younger actresses on the U.S. stage. Otherwise, Betrayal, which contains the most pauses of any Pinter play, is something of a pause itself in a portentous playmaking...