Stage:

...He has a way of besting Marjorie, forcing her to respond with an act or a threat of violence...

...she is essentially cheerful, very uncertain, given to oblique bursts of rebellion against the dominance of both Marjorie and Patricia...

...The man we see is cruel and dangerous, but he is also inventive, manipulative, a bad but dedicated liar with a taste for ethical and therapeutic cliches and a twisted talent for comic lines...

...The ending of Extremities is an ambiguous and, I think, a weak one...

...For most of the play, we watch her behaving in a way that makes her seem more malevolent than her prisoner...

...GERALD WEALESALD WEALES...

...Mastrosimone and his characters have some scary things to say about friends and enemies and the uneasy line between them...

...As though uncertain that the play can sustain the necessary tension, the director, Robert Allan Ackerman, has bridged the break between the early scenes with a grating, nervous, aggressive sound effect (Scott Lehrer is credited with the sound design) which is apparently intended to keep the audience on edge and on the edge of its seat...

...She is the parodied voice of reason and liberal understanding, a comic figure in a non-comic situation, quite certain that the problem of Raul can be taken care of by orderly discussion...

...Who are the tears for...

...Terry, once a rape victim, would prefer to hide, to separate herself from what is going on...

...they respond in ways that are usually considered stereotypically male, assuming that Marjorie's habitual manner is an invitation to rape...

...I suddently realized that I knew no such thing, that I had forgotten the ending...

...The audience with which I saw the play went wild with approval...

...Raul, having been forced into a confession by the knife-wielding Marjorie, is left alone with her while the other two women go for the police...

...The irony of their re-sponses, the implicit comment on our tendency to judge people and situations from the self-assurance of inadequate information, has a particularly ugly overtone here...

...Patricia is presumably a professional of some kind (she carries a briefcase) - a teacher, a social worker, a personnel director...

...Herself and the creature she has become...

...Raul uses one woman against another, eliciting sympathy from Terry and Patricia, casting himself as the innocent victim of the vicious Marjorie...

...All of these...

...I had read Mastrosimone's script a few years ago, and one of my fellow playgoers, caught up in the drama, said at intermission, "Oh, you know how it comes out...

...The audience, having witnessed the opening scene, knows that Marjorie's view of the rapist is a correct one, but the other two characters, who can see only an implacably murderous Marjorie and a blinded, trussed-up, wheedling man, come to doubt their roommate...

...There are a variety of ways of reading that unstinting applause...

...The audience may have wanted to show its admiration for Susan Saran-don and James Russo, whose performances were graphically convincing...

...The highly effective theatricality of the production, like that of Agnes of God, somewhat confuses what I take to be the more serious concerns of the script...

...The character of Raul, however well conceived, is essentially a device, an occasion for Marjorie to reveal herself and, more important, to show her in concert and in conflict with the two women with whom she shares the house...

...The disintegration of this group of women is the best thing about Mastrosimone's play...

...Marjorie sits beside the fireplace, discards her weapons and begins to cry...

...In a confession scene at the end of the play, he and the playwright suggest that he is helpless himself, a prey of his compulsion, but this psychological sentimentality is not portrayed through most of the play...

...That is unfortunate, for Extremities is more than a flashily staged, very well-acted evening of theater...

...Effective not simply as the dramatic presentation of three specific women, it suggests the precariousness of any relationship in which the shared sympathy and congeniality (which exists here too) is tested by a disorienting crisis...

...The reason is that there is no way, short of cataclysm, to bring this play to a close...

...At the first blackout (scene break), the man is blinded and the woman is strangling him with the wire of the telephone he earlier pulled out of the wall...

...The opening scene and the response to it allowed the play to get off to a rousing start, to carry the audience through the long stretch of verbal fencing between Marjorie and the man whom she has imprisoned in the fireplace...

...The unfortunate Raul...

...What surfaces is the distrust, the dislike, the envy that the two other women feel for Marjorie...

...Described this way the final image may seem to be a rich and elusive one, but to me it looked like a trick, a too neat solution to a difficult problem, stage gesture as a substitute for emotional and artistic force...

...He asks if he can return to the fireplace, crawls blindly to his cage which is now his sanctuary and curls up in the fetal position, singing crazily to himself...

...GOING TO 'EXTREMITIES' WILLIAM MASTROSIMONE'S Extremities begins with an attempted rape in which the intended victim, a can of bug spray happily at hand, turns the tables on her tormentor...

...It may have been yelling for a rescue as children did when I was a boy whenever the cavalry rode in to save the beleaguered wagon train...

...At the beginning of the play we have seen Marjorie react to a wasp bite by first killing the insect and then burning it with her cigarette...

...Mastrosimone's is more of a way out than an inevitable finish...

...Raul is a despicable man, a rapist and murderer, who preys on the helpless...

...I think that the response was as much visceral as theatrical, that the audience, full of people who had been mugged if not raped or whose close friends had so suffered, was signaling their desire if not their ability to fight back...

...The empathetic audience, fellow inhabitants of a world gone awry...

...I found myself thinking back to other moments in which the playwright or the director was too intrusive upstaging the seriousness of the play...

...I think that Mastrosimone wants to make a point, as David Mamet did in Edmond, about the way the extremities of contemporary life bring to the surface the violence and anger that were once held under by what used to be called civilizing forces...