Stage

...By comparison, Arthur Kopit is a playwright whose work genuinely engages me--Indians, Wings, The End of the World--so I find myself uneasy talking seriously about Tesich when there is a new Kopit play...

...He had a different intensity...

...Dramatically more interesting than the vast shared guilt of Joe's confession is Lou as an accusing figure, an image for all the homeless...

...that Lou is more than he seems becomes clear in his obvious attempt to manipulate Joe into some action not immediately apparent...

...As the Middle East settles back into being the Middle East--whatever the new alliances, the new governments--and the new world aborning begins to look more and more like the old one, the euphoria is sure to melt away...

...So much talk on the long road to getting neutered...

...It sounds like an unsuccessful parody of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, which apparently did drive Kopit to his typewriter...

...It is too pat, too neat, too like Tesich...

...The narrator (the daughter's highschool sweetheart a few years later) says, at the end of his opening monologue, "They used to live tight here," and in the Broadway (if not the published) version, the play ends on the same sentence...

...First performed as Bone-the-Fish in Louisville in 1989, it may intend to say something important about the American desire for money and success and what one sacrifices for it...

...An earlier version was performed at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1989 and was published in American Theatre (July/August 1989...

...Stephen Lang, who created Lou originally, is back in the role, giving one of those flamboyant, tic-ridden, audiencepleasing readings of his, this one even more annoying to me than his deranged colonel in And a Few Good Men...

...Road to Nirvana, however, is a great disappointment...

...Nothing else interests me...

...The connection between Joe and Lou aside, as a presence on stage, Lou seems by his dislocation to mock their closeness even while he takes joy in it...

...STAGE BEYOND THE MESA 'SPEED OF DARKNESS' & 'NIRVANA' teve Tesich told a New York Times interviewer (March 12, 1991) that "the only thing I will write for the theater is something that involves a moral issue...

...E xcept for the film Breaking Away, the Tesich works I have seen--from Lake of the Woods (1971) to Division Street (1980), which has its charms--have always suggested a kind of overreaching...

...In the first anger of their return, they worked as trash collectors--and incidentally as vengeance collectors--punishing the society that crippled them by pouring toxic waste into ravines on the mesa beyond the town...

...That might be the moment for The Speed of Darkness...

...At a final public meeting, during which we see Joe situated alone in a spotlight, he explains what they have done, asks the community's forgiveness, and says, haltingly, "I forgive you...

...but Lou, in the play's grandest melodramatic gesture, accepts the guilt for what they have done and demands, by his suicide, that Joe do the same...

...There is a moral issue or two or three in his new play, The Speed of Darkness...

...New to New York, that is...

...Jerry lets himself be castrated to get a contract for a rock-star movie...

...A great many important points are touched in the play, but it is never as strong as Tesich's desire to say something important...

...It turns out (well, there go the secrets, but knowing them never hurt audiences at Ibsen's plays) that their unit was caught in a chemical drop~what we now call "friendly fire" in an attempt to make death almost cozy--and that, although they were rescued and detoxed, they became sterile in the process...

...He is given most of the funny business (some of it painful), and he has a long (and extraneous) set piece on the usefulness for the homeless of traditional over modem sculpture as sleeping space...

...With the prospect that the mesa is to be developed, Joe sounds like a concerned ecologist, wanting to keep some part of the environment from the greed of developers...

...A play about the personal and public consequences of the Vietnam War, it comes to Broadway at an odd time, when the country is tiding high on the American triumph in the Persian Gulf, which presumably erased the stigma of defeat in Vietnam as though the divisiveness that that war visited on the country had to do only with defeat or victory, not with the fact of the war itself...

...Len Cariou gives a solid, perhaps too big performance as Joe, which is highly effective, but I find myself wishing I had seen Bill Raymond, who played the part in Chicago...

...and Kopit, whose other plays show such a mastery of varying stage voices, gets the words but not the music of Mamet's poetic obscenity...

...GERALD WEALES 19 April 1991:261...

...I had been warned that Kopit's play was disgusting or worse, but what it is, which is worse, is tedious...

...And the play does milk its effects...

...Of course, he is a friend of Joe's and he becomes an uneasy fixture in the family very quickly...

...An old-fashioned play, full of hidden secrets that will be revealed as it progresses, Speed concerns two Vietnam veterans, battlefront buddies...

...That Joe is not all that his surface stability suggests can be seen in the moments of anger---often aimed at his community--which burst through his faqade...

...This is not exactly a healing of society's wounds, since those words eventually banish Joe and his family...

...Joe has become a successful businessman, newly chosen as South Dakota Man of the Year, and a family man with a daughter (although technically not his) he dotes on...

...Kopit's movie hustlers are cartoons, where Mamet's are men driven to act like cartoons...

...Lou has become one of the walking wounded, a slightly disconnected ("When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw") member of the army of the homeless, trailing around the country following a tour of the replica of the Vietnam Memorial Wall...