Beast of Burden

Beast Through Oct. 12. New York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. (at Broadway); 212-239-6200. $65.

Let’s say a major American playwright wrote a new work explicitly supporting or justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq, even at this late date. Most likely he or she would receive from the left (led by the theater’s liberal lions and powerbrokers, no doubt) something tantamount to the fatwa bestowed on Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Still, for variety’s sake, why not write such a play—something attempting to spit-shine George W. Bush’s evil folly?

No major American dramatist, so far as I know, has obliged my idea as of yet. Instead, what we have witnessed this decade is the slow, steady accretion of new antiwar plays—the resurgence of a genre that last peaked after the grisly, soul-searching end of the Vietnam War. While such plays can and usually are barnburners, the problem comes in when they preach to the choir, reaffirming what audiences believe as opposed to challenging the reactionary viewpoint. Beast, a new play by Michael Weller (a major playwright since his Moonchildren opened on Broadway in 1972), is a case in point.

Subtitled “A Fever Dream in Six Scenes,” Beast is an on-stage buddy film, a bollixed Thelma and Louise in which the central characters are veterans of the war in Iraq and one of them is a zombie. To add additional life, if you will, director Jo Bonney makes excellent use of Tal Yarden’s military-accented video design and David Van Tieghem’s ominous original music and sound design.

As the play opens, Jimmy Cato (Logan Marshall-Green, in prosthetics marring his otherwise handsome pate) sits beside the coffin of Benjamin Voychevsky (Corey Stoll), his brother-in-arms. Done with Iraq, they’re now in Germany, awaiting homebound flights, one dead, one alive, both mutilated horribly. Cato shares a flask with a sympathetic lieutenant (Eileen Rivera), and when she steps out, the coffin lid lifts. It’s Voych, as Cato affectionately calls him. Nathan Johnson’s makeup design artfully shows Voych’s head having been put through hell (such as a dark hole where his ear used to be), while avoiding anything needlessly unearthly.

Cato is overjoyed that Voych isn’t dead—or completely so, as it were—and then their road show begins. First stop: the backroom lair of Captain Adler (Dan Butler), a showy quartermaster finalizing an arms-trading agreement with Mr. Aziz (a solid Raul Aranas), a shadowy Arab. Next, a German whorehouse run by garrulous Victor Leung (Aranas), where two sexy blind girls (Rivera and Lisa Joyce) can obviously tell very little about the clammier of their clientele. Then it’s a visit to Voych’s home in the Midwest, where his wife, Bonnie Ann (Joyce), has lately taken up with abusive Smalldon (Jeremy Bobb) as the son she bore Voych wails away in another room. In each scene, Voych has sufficient cause to demonstrate his superhuman strength, including an odd ability to easily murder men. Stoll grows increasingly affecting, despite the abstract nature of his character, as someone neither fully in nor out of our human realm.

Lacking home or hearth (Weller never does tell us much about Cato’s personal background), the men next decamp for Mount Rushmore, where trucker J.T. (Bobb) waxes poetic about life on the range. When the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln start intoning words to the startled Voych, they tell him to visit Crawford, Tex.—and we all know who lives there. So the final scene finds Butler back on stage, trapped beneath a grey wig, wittily impersonating our dear 43rd president as Cato and Voych exact a fiery revenge upon the man who started the Iraq war in the first place.

Sound heavy-handed? You bet it is. Indeed, it’s as if Weller builds the play to that mocking final scene, with its semi-sweet soup of comedy, absurdity and ghoulishness, just so antiwar-mongers can experience catharsis as George W. Bush is duct-taped to a chair and burned alive. But is Weller suggesting the Iraq war has literally created monsters of our men and women in uniform? And what is accomplished by successive revenge-fantasy scenes? In the confusing and farcical Beast, it’s as we’re the choir aloft in harmony, while new dramatic pathways, like IEDs on the side of the Iraqi road, remain unexplored—if not unexploded.