BWW Reviews: ROADKILL CONFIDENTIAL (A Noir-ish Meditation on Brutality)'

Sheila Callaghan's new play, 'Roadkill Confidential (a noir-ish mediation on brutality)' opened last weekend in the sleek 3LD space in the Financial District.

Trevor, played by the talented Rebecca Henderson, is an artist most famous for presenting enlarged photographs of a dead woman mangled in the wreckage of a car accident. Years later, the public awaits Trevor's latest work, but a mysterious FBI man with a missing eye (Danny Mastrogiorgio) suspects something amiss with Trevor's new project and is hot on her trail. Trevor's project is under wraps for most of the action of the play, leaving us to wonder as she goes out each night stalking small animals with her car, scraping them off the road and taking them back to her studio in the woods.

The playing space consists of two diamonds, the larger dotted with small television screens hanging from the ceiling and facing outward to the audience. At the top of the play, Trevor sits on her mattress watching her own television. She watches the screen in rapt attention and we hear the sounds of destruction, while on our screens hazy footage of humvees and sand played on a loop. There are a barrage of images projected throughout the show, all artfully composed by Shaun Irions and Lauren Petty, but it troubled me that Trevor and I were pretending to see the same thing. The root of Trevor's cold-blooded character existed in those images that I could not see, which meant that I knew no more about Trevor when I left the theater than when I came in. Roadkill Confidential is not so much a meditation on brutality as it is a dark comedy about brutal characters.

The characters surrounding Trevor are complex. William, an art history professor and Trevor's husband, thrives on his exclusive access to a living legend - often treating his wife as an extension of her artwork rather than a human being. William's son deals throughout the play with his exposure to the pictures of his mother's body, entangled in the wreckage of a car accident, at an early age. Melanie is their chirpy next door neighbor. She refuses to watch the evening news, yet envisions a possum and her babies scattered across the interstate. We learn a lot about these characters throughout the play - mostly from the FBI man who is capable of "spelunking" the depths of one's psyche with one look of his missing eye, and mostly in the form of a list. But none of this information contributes to the narrative of the play.

Despite Callaghan's crisp prose, the play fails to find the words to talk about what it really wants to talk about, suffering from the same affliction as Trevor's professorial husband. Intentions are overstated and actions overanalyzed in terms devoid of emotional meaning. Everyone's got troubles in this "noir-ish" world, but we never get the satisfaction of exploring why.

To post a comment, you must register and login.