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Horses at the Window
The truism that War Changes Men is nothing new. Stories of soldiers’ difficulties readjusting to civilian life are popular fare in American culture, from The Best Years of Our Lives to The Deer Hunter. In Romanian playwright Visniec’s avant-garde take, though, the concept finds both fresh life and a chilling universality.
Three vignettes each feature a male-female duo: a mother (Beata Pilch) sending her son (John Stokvis) off to battle; a daughter (Tiffany Ross) is oppressed by a father (John Gray) reliving past glory; a wife (Holly Thomas) is terrorized by her husband’s (John Kahara) inability to see beyond the enemy. Each of the female characters is visited later by a messenger in white, “the man who brings the flowers,” who informs them of the men’s deaths. (The messenger is portrayed in each case by the actor who played the man whose death he’s reporting.)
The purposely skewed nature of time and place in these scenes reinforces the insanity-of-war theme; the elliptical paranoia of Visniec’s scenarios recalls Caryl Churchill’s Far Away. As in that play, where even plant life is said to take sides, here we’re told that “the horses took over the abattoir.” (Churchill’s play about Romania, Mad Forest, also comes to mind.) Director Nica, a fellow Romanian, gives Horses an astoundingly creative, evocative staging. Freewheeling but deceptively precise, Nica’s remarkably physical production—as much a dance piece as a play—teeters gleefully on the edge of extravagance. His six cast members commit thoroughly and admirably to the reality of their surreality. In a play full-to-bursting with striking visual metaphors, the pas de trois among Kahara, Thomas and a cello is first among equals.
