It isn't likely that any of us will ever be visited, or haunted to be more precise, by the famous and infamous social upstarts from America's turbulent history who pop with regularity into Sally Wright's (Cassie Beck) head. More precisely, the armed insurrectionist/abolitionist John Brown, Underground Railroad conductor/Civil War spy Harriet Tubman, leader of slave rebellion Nat Turner, and the decorated Iraq war hero/Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh simply plop into the young and obviously possessed woman's kitchen (efficiently evoked by designer Raul Abrego) where Lucy Thurber's unapologetically polemical play is set.
Sally has just returned to live with her lower-income family in the ramshackle home in the economically depressed backwater New Hampshire town where she was raised. She has also recently experienced an eye-opening extended sojourn across the country following an injury that has ended her college athletic scholarship. With her, residing like intimate friends on the kitchen table, are biographies of the above mentioned historical figures. These serve as channels for their subjects' metaphysical appearance, sometimes individually, and sometimes as a collective.
Sally could either be losing her mind or simply becoming increasingly receptive to the provocative messages of these extraordinary activist/visitors who are the revolutionary and titular "insurgents." They're t apparently there to corroborate, support and also challenge Sally's own personal commitment to affecting change as well as address her increasing dismay with the socio-economic progress of the country she claims to love.
What she also loves, and makes clear, is America's love affair with guns, in particular the 12-gage semi-automatic that she keeps close her heart and also wields like an accommodating appendage. Before Beck, the actress, steps into her Sally character and into the setting, she addresses us even as she takes aim at us: "Don't be nervous...you all don't have to be afraid. Like all country girls, I was trained early, how to handle a gun. I'm just giving you a heads up."
This is another opportunity to be engaged, entertained and occasionally enraged by the dramatic fervor and a unique ferocity of Thurber, author of the overlapping cycle of The Hill Town Plays produced by different companies at various Off Broadway theaters a couple of years ago. The Insurgents , as produced by the Labyrinth Theater Company, continues Thurber's display of disenchantment with a social and political system in which the impoverished and disenfranchised are summarily ignored and beaten down.To read the rest of the review please go to http://curtainup.com/insurgents15.html
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