![]() In one scene, Cy swoons to an aria on a record player, mouthing the words with the singer as Ed itches to turn it off. It feels like the moment you pulled back the curtain and realized the Wizard of Oz was just an eccentric and lonely old man. This adds to the dark humor of the play, but this choice also weakens the characters’ connection to their Greek inspirations from the House of Atreus. ![]() At times, it is hard to imagine that they were ever as vital and ruthless as they tell us. The performances of these actors give the impression that we are being allowed to watch the intimate lamentable reality of two elderly men. Though both actors play their age, Deblinger’s physical expressions demonstrate a more over the top farcical quality, while Cy, played by Christopher Baker, exhibits physicality like a dinosaur on the brink of extinction. David Deblinger, a co-founder of the renowned LABrynth Theater Company, plays Ed as a deeply disturbed kind of schlemiel. The two men of ambiguous age and purpose, lost in an underworld of destruction, and gruesome remnants of the world we once knew. The play feels like a blend of Beckett’s Endgame and Waiting for Godot. These stories have a mythical quality that ensures their survival for generations to come because the very essence of our social psyche is tied to them. Based on what we know of the Greek classic plays, blood feuds never die, and epic tragedy has a scope that reaches far beyond human mortality. The play takes place in a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which these two, plus the medical staff that keeps them alive, and their immediate family are the last remaining souls. Supposedly thousands of years old, and still hobbling around their chamber seething poison at one another, we wonder why they aren’t dead. Keene models these two after the infamous Atreus and Thyestes, warring brothers who stop at nothing to ensure their own absolute power, and seek to eliminate all competition, including one another. In the opening scene, a scraggly man in a dingy brown nightgown sits up on his hospital gurney and asks, “How can you still be disgusting after a long life filled with disgust?” In Keene’s new play, The Killing Room, the two main characters Ed and Cy, both wretched elderly shells of former kings, wrestle with this question. ![]() ![]() Darkly comical and creepy, Australian playwright, Daniel Keene pays a visit to the end of the world and finds that the ancient themes of blood feud, brotherly competition, and greed still dominate. ![]()
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