Living in the “Dying City”

Continuing with the premise that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, here is another handy pros-vs.-cons guide to Dying City, now playing at Green Lake’s Bathhouse Theater (honestly! Green Lake is not that bad!).

Cons:

• 9/11, The Iraq War, Abusive Families, Infidelity, Homophobia, Lies, Suicide – too much of a downer, man!
• That actor dude playing twin brothers, I don’t get it
• Why do good women fall for bad men?

Pros:

• The actor dude has terrific stage presence and is totally convincing playing two completely different people
• The situation is gripping and the people seem real
• It’s not so much about the war without as the war within.  (Profound moment of realization)

Chris Maslen plays identical twin brothers, one of whom has died in Iraq and the other who visits his widow a year later.  When the play goes to flashback and he strides onto the stage as Craig, the soldier brother, you do a double-take because he’s wearing the same clothes but has completely different mannerisms, way of talking and personality.  Craig and Peter, his surviving twin, are like two versions of the same person, one who reacts to life’s problems with lies, anger, hatred, and destruction and the other with openness, reconciliation, love, and life.

Shana Bestock, who, interestingly enough, is also the Artistic and Education Director of the Theater, plays the widow Kelly, and she looks suitably exhausted, hopeless and lonely.  Peter’s intrusion into her life raises an enormous cloud of painful memories of Craig’s last night before going to Iraq, of his ugly, contemptuous treatment of her which never got resolved when he went to war and got killed.  The war’s violence is not separate from Craig’s internal violence, what he calls the “horror of the core of me, of who I have always been”.  Peter hints that he may not have been killed in battle, but may have killed himself, instead.  And the dying city of the title may sound like Baghdad, but it is just as much at home in New York.

The play delves into great darkness but its twin brothers also remind us that if you get beyond the simplicity of an us-versus-them, right-versus-left, inner-versus-outer duality you will discover a light of self-awareness that there are better choices, whether for world leaders or us folk struggling with everyday battles.

(Dying City plays through April 11th. Tickets available at the Seattle Public Theater at the Bathhouse web site)