Coyote on a Fence
About Face Theatre
Bobby Reyburn, meanwhile, is a killer and proud of it. An unapologetic white supremacist, this gimpy, gap-toothed young redneck set fire to a black church, murdering 37 parishioners–including 14 Sunday school kids–because they’d mocked him when he’d invaded their services to preach Aryan superiority. He freely admits he’s guilty as charged–but only “under Jew laws, not God’s.” After spending six years in solitary while his court-appointed lawyers appealed his death sentence, he’s decided to stop fighting and let the state kill him.
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From John and Bobby’s evolving relationship–and their vastly different personalities–Graham spins a complex, credible drama that probes the subject of capital punishment without ever resorting to political preachments. Bobby’s decision to die upsets John more than Bobby’s crime. Though John is disgusted by Bobby’s racism, he also knows that this hate-mongering hillbilly has had a screwed-up life. The throwaway son of an alcoholic prostitute and a probable victim of fetal alcohol syndrome, Bobby was gang-raped at age 12 in a juvenile detention home; the attack left him with the shattered hip that still causes him to limp. The only person who ever cared for him was an uncle who taught him that white Christians are superior to “niggers, Jews, and mud people.” Shocked that Bobby’s psychological background was never introduced at trial, John sets out to stir up sympathy for him with the aid of a New York Times reporter–but his biggest obstacle is Bobby himself, who’s determined to die a martyr.
Neil LaBute’s Bash: Latterday Plays, offered in a well-acted, elegantly austere staging directed by Eric Rosen and designed by Darin Keesing, also focuses on murderers. Like Graham’s Bobby, the three killers in this program of monologues openly, if not always easily, admit their awful crimes: two infanticides and one gay bashing. Their confessions, peppered with references to ancient mythology, remind us that murder at once appalls and fascinates as a manifestation of human behavior at its most extreme–and its most basic.
