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Devils Don't Forget
Gripped by the desire to create live, lurid trash noir—a not entirely ignoble goal, given that an audience’s close proximity to simulated torture is the opposite of sense-numbing digital entertainment—the Mammals assume that an extended fantasy sequence of physical and psychological mutilation is enough to carry an evening. Surprisingly, they’re not far off. Fisher’s 75-minute ballet of fetishized violence, in which a mad-ish man hallucinates two kinky thugs committing unspeakable acts on him and women he knows, threatens its way into your comfort zone with uncommonly low-tech but high-impact menace. If it doesn’t quite stand solidly enough as a self-contained night of theater, it’s still a legit flash of lip-smacking grime horror.
Part of the storefront tradition of low pop Grand Guignol—you can also see such ghoulishness currently on display in WildClaw Theatre’s zombie play The Revenants—Devils is the second installment in a trilogy. Fisher’s material is inarguably short on character development. But thanks to the wild-eyed kinesis of Hall, as a blade for hire, and the sweaty naivety of Garza, as his flunkie, as well as the hungover-stud-like presence of leading man Frymire, the play still offers recommendable men behaving badly. Whether the fact that the female characters are more exploited is misogynist, or just an accurate expression of the human condition, remains up for debate.
