The Critics Applaud "AND THEN SHE MOVED THE FURNITURE"by Manny Diez
Dave Amber of New Times Wrote:
The Public Theatre, which recently presented the menacingly violent Barefoot Boy with Shoes On, somehow found a play to trump it, with And Then She Moved the Furniture, the first production of Miami playwright Manny Diez's chilling tale of army base domestic abuse. Here, finally, is a fresh, post-9/11 stage drama about war that truly hits home. Public Theatre's director David Jay Bernstein certainly seems to harbor a soft spot for the antiwar military-theatrical complex. Last year he did David Rabe's Streamers, about soldiers preparing for the Vietnam War. Now his soldier is coming home from Afghanistan, and this soldier does not want to be fucked with. Diez's graphic play is a fictional telling of a true story coming out of Fort Bragg in the summer of 2002. In the heat of that North Carolina summer, four soldiers murdered their wives, and two of them then committed suicide. To top off the violence, an army wife murdered her Special Forces husband. The resulting investigation pointed blame at histories of marital problems and stress from wartime separation, which leaves you wondering: What's up at Fort Bragg? What's up, at least in the play, is that dysfunctional Special Forces sniper Todd Dawkins, played with unnervingly soft menace by Matt Stabile, is going on trial for beating to death his wife, Trish (Nikki Fridh). His weapon of choice is not a sniper's rifle, but the Plantation boy favorite — the baseball bat. Now with blood on his hands, Todd must explain himself. Through the play's juxtaposition of present and past, you learn all kinds of unsettling facts about life for soldiers coming home, as well as about life for soldiers' spouses. Most important, you learn about the sniper's "safe place," the den in his home, his sanctuary, which army wives are warned not to remodel while their husbands are off to war, or else face grave consequences. Furniture is a concise and powerful play. As Todd, in prison-orange jumpsuit or desert camo gear, with a shaved head and baby face, toggles between psychopathic precision killer and the prewar boy his wife found so endearing. Like Vincent D'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket, Todd is both innocent and insane. "When you have the target in your scope, it's a rush," this God-like killer gleams. Fridh is nothing less than brilliant as the warm, ill-starred wife Trish. Despite our fully knowing the tragedy waiting at the play's end, Stabile and Fridh work through their awry connections to keep surprising us, especially in a brutally soft rape scene that, because of the pair's talent, will haunt you for a very long time.
Bill Hirschman of The Sun-Sentinel Wrote
Unlike the precision of the sniper in ...And Then She Moved the Furniture, Manny Diez's script is as blunt -- yet undeniably powerful -- as a sledgehammer. . . Based on four murders at Fort Bragg in 2002, Furniture focuses on Todd Dawkins (Matt Stabile), the abused son of a perfectionist career soldier, who became an eerily effective sniper for the Special Forces in Afghanistan. We meet him through Sgt. Anderson (Merry Jo Pitasi), the military lawyer assigned to defend him after he beats his wife to death with a baseball bat, ostensibly because she moved the furniture in the den while he was gone on assignment. Dawkins explains matter-of-factly, "She was my wife. Mine. I was the only one who had the right to kill her." Under Anderson's questioning, resembling a psychoanalyst's tough-love session, Dawkins flashes back through the origins of his love affair with Trish (Nikki Fridh), and their marriage's disintegration as he becomes unable to separate his stateside home life from the mental defense mechanisms he uses in his job overseas.
The pivotal scene -- Dawkins raping his wife to reassert his claim over her -- is especially harrowing. Stabile, Fridh and director David Jay Bernstein stage it with an appropriate and terrifying brutality. Stabile's face betrays the violence under his usually limpid demeanor. Fridh's eyes emit waves of pain at the spousal betrayal and the shock that her beloved is capable of this. The playwright, director and actors also deftly construct a wordless, smooth montage of the sniper getting married, carrying his wife over the threshold and then leaving on a series of assignments that leave him colder and colder, all to the soundtrack of Barry Sadler's The Green Berets. |
ADVISORY: "And Then She Moved The Furniture. . ."
Contains Adult Situations and Language Not For Children Nor The Faint of Heart
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