The Infidel
But it’s as a playwright that he’s shown perhaps the greatest precision. In his first play, The Actor Retires–actually a monologue with a few supporting characters–he fired a quiverful of barbs at the hypocritical, self-aggrandizing world of professional theater. In his recent The Vanishing Twin, which he also directed for Lookingglass, he laced a deliciously indulgent satire of gothic horror with rock and roll, staging the whole outrageous two-hour affair so scrupulously that it flew by in no time.
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Perhaps it’s only natural that in his newest play Norris should be drawn to the courtroom, where every word is weighed and debated. But The Infidel–given a thoughtful premiere by director Anna D. Shapiro–isn’t the usual courtroom drama. The reason is another of Norris’s quirks: a fascination with life’s second tier. True, the play is about a state supreme court justice, Garvey, convicted of stalking his former mistress after leaving her threatening telephone messages and setting fire to her car. But Norris hasn’t set the play before a mighty bench, instead tucking it away in a sickly institutional room where a long-suffering magistrate named Moss, Garvey’s former colleague, oversees a pathetic, perfunctory administrative hearing. Norris’s treatment makes grand questions of guilt and innocence moot; Moss must simply determine whether Garvey deserves an early release after serving just 14 months of his sentence.
To accomplish this transformation Norris employs two tactics, one of which is less than successful. First, he shows us the man’s behavior outside the administrative hearing in a series of flashbacks–the mental lapses to which Garvey repeatedly succumbs. We see him pulled over for a routine traffic violation, then sitting in a neighborhood bar waiting for his mistress. Good-natured but edgy, at times he chats in so many directions at once he seems poised on the brink of senility. In the barroom scene, he’s so at ease with the bartender that he explains in great detail the dissatisfaction he feels with his marriage, his contempt for the wife he no longer desires, and his unnerving delight in embracing his own misogyny.
But The Infidel is bold. In defiance of our culture’s propensity to see sexual deviants as shadowy outsiders with an inborn criminality, Norris gives us every reason to fall in love with a brutal misogynist. It makes for a disturbing evening–and surely this piece will be hated by many. But given the irrelevance of so much contemporary American playwriting, we need more unsettling plays, the kind that force us to rethink our moral positions.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Michael Brosilow.
