THE HOUSTON PRESS REVIEWS INFERNAL
BRIDEGROOM'S PRODUCTION OF THE HOTEL PLAY

Houston's liberal (or what passes for liberal here in Bush country) alternative weekly reviews the play in which I am currently playing a small part:

The disturbing moments that make up this script take place over the course of one day in a hotel somewhere in the tropics. More than 50 characters meander through this world. But we learn almost nothing about most of them. One man complains that he's gotten a room with four bathrooms when he's staying at the hotel alone. Another is a doctor who's on vacation because he takes on his patients' symptoms when he examines them, even to the point of becoming impotent. We watch a wife made miserable by her wretched husband, who says to her as they sit in the cafe, "You have made yourself so hateful to me that I do not fear in the slightest the sight of your dead body." Few of these characters have names. In the program they're identified only by the weird things they do and say: Among them are Woman in Suggestive Clothes (Tek Wilson), The Couple Who Gets Bad Coffee (Elisabeth Jackson and Ron Reeder) and Man Who Tells Fish Story (Noel Bowers).

The anonymity of these characters is unsettling, and at first these chaotic snatches of dialogue are interesting only in their strangeness. But after a while it begins to feel like Shawn is up to something heady. The audience is put in the strange position of having to create the connections between the moments themselves. The hateful husband simply gets up to leave after reducing his wife to tears; the man with all the bathrooms disappears once he knows that they aren't going to cost him any more than three bathrooms would. Shawn's refusal to make any connections between the characters or to provide any familiar narrative structure that will tie these vignettes together starts to look like a sort of tone poem on the very nature of making meaning. The audience must make all these individual moments meaningful, much like a dreamer would after waking up from a nightmare full of seemingly unrelated images.

Yes, that's more like it. I like this review much better than the Houston Chronicle's. The Press critic seems to have more of a grasp of what Shawn is trying to do with the script. The point is not to follow some story; rather, the audience should simply let the play wash over them, allowing any meaning the play might have to become manifest later, in memory. The Hotel Play is theater as music: any critic who doesn't get that or finds only frustration and discomfort while seeing it really has no business reviewing plays.

Of course, I could simply be biased here: out of some sixty-odd actors, this review only names five, and I'm one of them! Ha! In yer face, Chronicle!

Click here for the rest of the review.

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