Empty
Brett Neveu’s Empty is set in the days immediately prior to and following September 11, 2001, but it isn’t about the World Trade Center atrocity. It’s about the significance of the counterculture.
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Jessi D. Hill’s staging appears to endorse this point of view. But it seems to me that DJ’s making the same mistake the hippie nostalgists make, which is to think of the 60s and the people who lived through them as monolithic. They weren’t. At best they can be viewed as a confluence of interests that produced provocative harmonies for a while–sort of like the Beach Boys–creating an impression of coherence that wasn’t borne out by the facts. That, truth be told, actually obscured the facts. George W. Bush and Bill Gates, after all, are members of the generation called boom. So is Osama bin Laden. Even as I was rioting for the revolution, a plan for the land I ran through was on its way to fruition–and I wasn’t in on it. Who knows what most of us aren’t in on at this very moment?
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Tony Martin.
