Benchmark’s production of ‘Blasted’ tests the limits of audience endurance
It’s one thing to say your theatre is daring enough to present challenging plays when most others play it safe in favor of filling seats. It’s another to pick a play that’s so wildly out there that even the most die-hard theatre fans might struggle to even see the playwright’s message through all the horrific scenes.
Such is the case with Benchmark Theatre’s new production of Blasted, a 1995 play by Sarah Kane with its thematic origins inspired by the war in Kosovo and which the theatre says is its response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I’d be hard pressed to recommend seeing this play to anyone as an entertainment, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see it — if you have the stomach.
For the most part, the action in Blasted is not meant to be taken literally. Much of the setup makes little sense, starting with the fact that we’re in a hotel room in England that’s soon half destroyed by a bombing in the midst of some kind of war. (The nod to the present-day situation is done with a TV playing cable news coverage of the war in Ukraine.) The characters are miserable, broken wretches, imbued with just about every bit of awfulness humanity is capable of. Over the course of the show, we see violence, rape, soul-baring nudity, psychological torture, death and even cannibalism. Just like war, but with a convoluted plot that lacks structure in much the same way the fog of war obscures sense and meaning.
Hillary Wheelock as Cate in ‘Blasted’
Ian (Josh Levy) is a tabloid journalist on the tail end of middle age who’s maneuvered a much-younger woman to join him for a night in a fancy hotel room. Played by Hillary Wheelock, Cate is a stammering, fainting basket case who, while she’s slept with Ian previously, says she’s no longer interested. Ian comes in wearing a gun in a shoulder holster, which he clumsily wields whenever there’s a knock at the door. Facing a fatal disease, he’s on his last legs and eager to drink, smoke and have sex as much as he can.
Together, they’re tough to watch as Ian tries to reconcile why she’s agreed to join him if she’s not interested in sex and, sad to say, he doesn’t take no for an answer. In addition to his illness, he’s paranoid that someone is after him — although he can’t articulate who that might be or why. His nightmare comes true when a soldier (Jayce Johnson) muscles his way into the room pointing a gun and looking for something to eat.
Hunger is a common theme here, with all three characters ravenous as the night in the room turns into days and maybe weeks or even months. With war now part of their here-and-now, it’s not hard to draw a line between what transpires between the three and what goes on in war zones. One soldier is all we need to represent everything awful about human conflict, and this confused young man whose girlfriend was killed in the conflict regales Ian with tales of some of the war crimes he’s been part of recently. When a bomb strikes the hotel and partially destroys their room, it seems to prompt the solider to start taking out his grief on Ian (Cate is gone at this point, having escaped out the bathroom window.)
Intimacy director Amelia Morse has her hands full as the story careens between violent, quasi-consensual sex and rape, and as we head into the last 20 minutes or so of the play, the script veers into full shock mode. Without spoiler details, suffice to say that I’ve never seen anything like it on stage. Loud noises and flashing lights accompany some of the horror as the soldier does a number on Ian and Cate returns to the edge of the stage — naked and trembling — and then runs back out the door.
Even after all this, the play continues on its downward spiral into depravity.
Whatever one may think of the script, director Neil Truglio has done solid work presenting this pressure cooker of a story with two fine, harrowing performances by Levy and Wheelock. Johnson seemed a little shakier in the role of the soldier on opening night, but still scares the hell out of Ian and the audience with his unhinged and fractious character.
If war is indeed hell, Blasted may be one of the best ways to describe the indescribable. It’s rough terrain to be sure and certainly goes overboard with some of its extreme depictions. But if you’re looking for something different, something that rips away the veneer of civility to show us at our worst, this one delivers. It took a lot of guts for Benchmark to produce Blasted, and all three actors deserve theatrical Purple Hearts for their courage in performing it.
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