Edgewise

When the war comes home to America, it won't be with a whimper or a bang: it'll be with fries. That's the beauty of Eliza Clark's darkly comic Edgewise, in which three teens find their everyday Saturday morning shift at the local (Mc) Dougal's interrupted by an air strike and a bloodied stranger. The whiff of bombast is bombed away with surgical precision, forcing the characters to grow up rather quickly, their mundane ramblings quickly turned to panicky attempts to restore order to their safe little world. From the convincing mannerisms of the actors to the sharp set design, which contrasts torture in the storeroom with the service with a smile of the cheery dining room, and smart direction, which plays the moment-to-moment shifts in full so that the exaggerated comedy never compromises the integrity of the situation, it's a clever look at what a Civil War on Terror between an indistinguishable Us and Them might look like: an order of paranoia with a side of fear.

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