Field of Wet Dreams

But the main target of Wilson’s show is the venerable American success story -- how easy it is, once money is involved, for fratricide to rear its frizzy head, and how much more easily that is likely to happen once the accelerants of sex and drugs are tossed onto the pyre. For all the money the brothers -- actual and fictitious -- invested to make fucking a guiltless, liberating, velour-soft experience, in the end they hit the gutter as hard as any wino kicked out of a peep-show booth.

Director Mark Seldis works wonders with this 90-minute play which, in earlier incarnations, ran two and a half hours. Perhaps the Magic Theater‘s premiere production carried more historical explanations about the brothers’ lives. With set and lighting designer Don Luce transforming the Gang‘s tiny El Centro space into a dark, intimate club venue with cabaret-table seating (one wall is covered by a curtain of Mylar-ribbon, another sports what might be considered trophy dildos), Seldis orchestrates a dense vortex of psychological turbulence; he also finesses the awkward nuances of people desperately trying to connect with each other, as in a wonderfully sad scene in which a coked-up Manny nervously tries to put the moves on Persephone. Dividing the house is a cock-and-balls-shaped dance runway -- talk about your thrust stage. A pre-show of pole dancing by understudies Heather Ashton and RoseofSharon Stoneall nicely eases us into the play’s environment, whose fateful momentum is constantly kept on pace by John Zalewski‘s somber sound design. The cast members ably assume their roles, with Gray in particular attuned to her character’s heartaches, and Hanket and Rivkin taking special glee in their oddball personae. (On the night I attended, Tom Booker subbed for Gass as Randy.)

The show features only scant nudity and some silhouetted lovemaking, and, for all the talk of cocks and fellatio, the only real gagging comes when the actors have to wrap their mouths around lines like ”I miss us. I miss what we had“ and its rejoinding ”You‘re the only person to get to my heart.“ That notwithstanding, this is an evening that stares at what can and does go wrong when the flesh is willing, and to that long-ago time when people looked to sex and columns of cocaine as the keys to ultimate freedom. For, as the Mitchell brothers found, what often lies behind the green door is madness and death.