Hellhound on My Trail
It’s tempting to dismiss Johnson’s confounding scenes as outdated dabbling in late-modernist absurdism. But Pinter, whose work is still often misread as absurdist, actually communicates the power of withheld information and of characters living under some unnamed constant threat. Moreover Pinteresque blank bits on the theatrical canvas heighten rather than compromise the sense of real life onstage. After all, people caught up in crises don’t have time for the kind of exposition we’re asked to accept as realistic in the traditional well-made play. As Pinter shows, you don’t have to know everything to know enough.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Blakemore and company maintain this intensity for as long as Johnson’s script will allow: only in the last third of the final scene does his sense of drama fall apart completely. In the second scene, “Head Rolling and Rolling,” Rom Barkhordar and Cindy Marker portray Jack Toast and Kate Wendell, government bureaucrats also caught up in the Department of Agriculture investigation. They meet for an impromptu lunch before going into an interrogation, which it appears Jack will chair while Kate occupies the hot seat. In the final scene, “Hellhound on My Trail,” Marigold’s drifter brother Cass, played by Steve Walker, is holed up in a seedy motel while a supposed FBI agent, played by J. Scott Turner, holds him at gunpoint. When the agent reveals his true identity, neither he nor Cass seems to have much stake in the action, and the play simply dribbles away.
