Harm's Way

"If you're not part of the show," says one of the myriad tricksters in Mac Wellman's Harm's Way, "you're part of them what takes it all in, and that's a fool." Maybe some people will be in on the show, but I felt like a fool, a perplexed yet curious fool. Perplexed because I couldn't make sense of Wellman's oblique and perhaps meaningless usages of McKinley and Cleveland, nor of his scattered episodes of dark moral wandering, short segments of murder and deceit. Curious because johnmichael rossi, who directs the newFangled theatReR, has some inventive ways of staging Wellman's work, dressing up the rags of words in rags of clothes and stitching it all together with a dark circus of vagabonds. Ultimately, however, just a fool, because I didn't walk away from this production feeling much of anything, and that makes me a time-squandering fool.

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