High Life
Azusa Productions
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MacDougall spares no terrifying detail in drawing the portraits of four drug addicts trying to pull off a rather complicated bank heist. In one horrifying scene, ringleader Dick and his psychopathic second, Bug, shoot up, searching for unscarred veins after a lifetime of IV drug use. (Whoever did the makeup for Brian Pudil as Dick and Joe Forbrich as Bug has created repulsively realistic bruises and scars on their arms and legs.) In another scene, someone gets his throat slit, blood spurting everywhere.
What makes MacDougall’s play remarkable is that, after working hard in the first act to establish his characters’ criminality–their “otherness”–he then demystifies them, revealing how much they’re like the rest of us. The way they plan the heist makes it seem an ordinary human endeavor, a business deal or a military campaign. The second act, set in a car outside the bank the four plan to rob, depicts a series of petty fights, making the crooks seem a squabbling family on a long car trip. The result is at first hilarious–few things are as comic as seeing scary people behave like five-years-olds. But as the act progresses, their bickering becomes heartbreaking because it’s so small-minded and counterproductive. These nowhere men seem emblematic of our every silly, infantile foible, every flaw that interferes with our success and well-being.
In some ways this failure is surprising. Tarantino’s screenplay for Reservoir Dogs, also written with Avary, worked well onstage when Azusa did it in 1998, in large part because the dialogue has a pointed Mamet-like quality. And the conversations between the two hit men at the center of Pulp Fiction are clearly modeled on the dialogue in Reservoir Dogs. But in this Azusa production it seems artless and even pointless at times. Similarly, the storytelling device that makes Pulp Fiction an interesting movie–the way its tales unspool out of chronological order–seems forced and manipulative onstage. The fact is, Reservoir Dogs is a simple, powerful story told straight through–which works in the theater–while Pulp Fiction is not.
