Acts of Mercy
In just one play–the blistering Acts of Mercy–New York-based Michael John Garces contributes more to the American stage than most playwrights do over a lifetime. Unearthed by Chicago’s scrappy Flush Puppy Productions–inexplicably, the script had gone unproduced for two years–it has a taut, Spartan style that masterfully blends the poetic naturalism of Chekhov, the indeterminate menace of Pinter, and the streamlined brutality of Mamet. Garces finds in unremarkable characters souls as complex, compelling, and enigmatic as any in the greatest works of theater. And he does so using a minimal yet demanding approach.
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Unlike most contemporary playwrights, Garces presumes the intelligence of theater artists and audiences alike. Nothing in the script introduces the characters; we find only seven first names on the first page. Their relationships, personalities, histories, even their ages must be inferred from their lines. And there isn’t a single stage direction. At first glance, the dialogue seems meager at best. Characters rarely string together more than four or five words, almost never a complete sentence or even a complete thought. About the only things these characters say with certainty are “I don’t know,” “I guess,” and “Maybe.”
All of Garces’s characters–who also include a stripper and Eladio’s brother’s mistress–are paralyzed by ambivalence; a decisive stance seems impossible because love and spite continually bleed into each other. Eladio and his cousins ache for some sort of masculine validation, wasting an evening in a strip club, yet all they can do is police their every word and gesture, seizing every opportunity to call someone else a faggot. Though Eladio’s brother, Jaime, won’t speak to his dying father, he longs for the old man to send for him directly rather than relying on Eladio. Jaime does visit Nestor while Eladio is out with his cousins, making one awkward attempt to overcome his deep-seated hatred. But in the first act’s harrowing climax, Jaime unleashes his anger on his father, declaring he wishes he were already dead. “I’m going to walk out of that door,” Jaime says, “and I’m not coming back until the funeral. The blessed burial….And you are going to waste time eating waste time shitting waste time not sleeping but it will never again be my time you are wasting ever.”
This is the sort of intelligent, passionate work one sees only rarely, even on the biggest stages in town. And if this pickup band of unfunded twentysomethings holed up in a tiny storefront can act circles around our best-paid, best-rehearsed casts, one need never fear for the life of the theater.
