Shoppers : Two Plays by Denis Johnson

Rating:
Summary: Second-Rate Sam Shepherd--With Promise
Review: You have to hand it to the author, he's found a rich vein of critically acclaimed theater to ape in his debut as a playwright. These two plays, with shared characters between them, pluck some of the most pleasing tropes of Sam Shepherd's more cogent writing (criminal brothers, abusive mothers, emotionally paralized fathers, powerless clergymen--heck, almost all of Buried Child, though in this case it would be Flattened Child) and make them more amusing than mysterious. However, while the elements are often unoriginal and somewhat out of date, Johnson has a knack for understanding what makes a scene dramatic. His characters almost always want something and take risks to get it. As a result, the plays are conflict driven and offer actors meaty motivations to chew on. That's more than what often passes for playwrighting today, so there's promise here. Like the writer's novels, the tone is Western noir, with some biting wit carrying the banter. The reader, like the performer, will certainly be amused, though may not find that the works create any lasting impact. Hellhound, the first play, is a series of mildly absurd two-person scenes that reveal their interconnections gracefully if without surprise. Shoppers, the second play, hews more strictly to unities of time and place, but erupts in a more theatricalized style (subverting stage realism with an invisible dog and a television that interacts with the "real" world--a device that even the characters remark upon for its novelty). Stage directions by the author insist on only the music he indicates and realistic set pieces. That's a shame, because Johnson's at his best when he takes off on original, unrealistic flights of fancy--finding his own dramatic style and inching beyond realism, Shepherd, and watered-down cultural criticism. The strength here is in images, particularly in unusual juxtapositions. Sample these for the potential hinted at, and let's hope that the author has more dream-poetry-drama to come, particularly in the third play in this series, which centers on a character oft-mentioned but not seen in these works. Act one of that work, Soul of a Whore, is published in the latest edition of McSweeney's.