Drawing War
Yet in the tradition of The Iceman Cometh, All My Sons, A Streetcar Named Desire, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Buried Child, Neveu’s play exposes festering secrets barely masked by a facade of normality, family, and friendship. Set on one long Christmas day in a small town somewhere in the midwest, Drawing War charts the actions of a seemingly typical family, the Brauns, as they plod through the rituals of the holiday: going to services, opening presents, visiting relatives, exchanging Christmas cookies with the neighbors, paying respects at the grave of a loved one. But as the Brauns travel from church to home to the cemetery to the nursing home where a grandmother stricken by Alzheimer’s lives, with occasional stops at McDonald’s, Neveu gradually reveals clues about a tragedy that’s isolated each member of the family from the others, leaving them to nurse their guilt and grief privately. Dad displays symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, carefully folding wrapping paper before throwing it away. Mom talks to herself, recounting tales of ghostly apparitions, and is devoted to radical antiabortion activism, a cause that’s already earned her jail time and is likely to earn her more. “I’m doing this for the children,” she insists. Jeff, the teenage son, observes his parents with what seems typical appalled adolescent alienation. (“Oh my god, are my folks really this weird?”) Yet he carries perhaps the greatest pain of any of them, expressed in a climactic confession, one of the play’s rare outbursts of emotion.
