God knows exactly what this violent play is trying to say, but Chicago-based writer David Hauptschein has a lot of terrible fun saying it.
Inspired by the Charles Manson killings in California in 1969, the twisted action is littered with cryptic clues and mystifying red herrings. The characters include a clairvoyant young woman experiencing psychosomatic pains in her hands, her sexually precocious sister and their nerdish father who is aiming to get rich quick by flogging fortune pencils. Into this suburban mix steps a hypnotherapist who is a family friend, a jaded cop who is investigating a break-in and an apparently harmless guitar-strumming hippie.
Each character is an American archetype and Hauptschein seems to be trying to put the American dream not on trial, but into analysis. His characters experience the outside world as a freakish nightmare mediated by television.
They are particularly dismayed by such phenomena as Japanese people attaching spring clips to their nipples during marathon endurance shows.
Closer to home the neighbourhood is also believed to be teeming with still-to-be discovered serial killers - such as the "flesh-moulding psychopath" described in the papers. A bit like the film Fight Club, Hauptschein's play suggests ordinary God-fearing Americans are in the grip of runaway mass-psychosis.
In any event, the medium is the message and director Julio Maria Martino has a lot of fun dishing it up. Victoria Byrne is a disturbed and disturbing Cassandra character as the clairvoyant sister with painful hands.
Danielle King, as the sneering wayward sister, doesn't believe her wittering sibling and nor does John Albasiny as their nerdish father who is immersed in hare-brained business plans. Kathryn Akin is one of those supremely complacent shrinks who believes everybody simply has to fess up to feel better. Jonathon Sims as the investigating officer could work less hard (even if he is supposed to be wired on caffeine), but Tom Hayes is an effortlessly bizarre hippie character. He seems to have fallen through a wormhole in Woodstock to become a mad-eyed avenging bogeyman today.
Trance
