-
-
Ad Space
(728 x 90)
Published at 7:52am
Survey
Sign up today!
As one-person shows go, you certainly could do worse than Mary Scruggs’s recounting of her cross-country motorcycle sojourn with 300 Vietnam vets who trekked to the Memorial Wall in D.C. The only woman in the pack (the male coworker who persuaded her to join the group chickened out), Scruggs found herself playing confidante and nursemaid to emotionally fragile leathernecks who, for all their light-packing lifestyle, dragged a lot of baggage behind them.
Like most solo shows that tell first-person stories, Missing Man is ultimately about a tourist. But Scruggs, a longtime Second City vet and playwright, at least has the decency to put the emphasis on the characters in the story whose pain is greater than her own. (Doug Wright, whose Pulitzer-winning monologue play I Am My Own Wife seems to be less about a real-life oppressed East German transsexual than about the harrowing sacrifices he had to make to write about a real-life oppressed East German transsexual, surely could take a lesson here.)
But despite Scruggs’s admirable self-effacement and genial stage presence—her we’re-all-in-this-together delivery style is comfort food even when it’s not completely polished—she isn’t able to crisply delineate her characters either as a writer or a performer. Despite painful backstories and tattooworthy nicknames, the men on the tour blur together like, well, a bunch of guys on motorcycles. It’s a relief to see a solo artist who isn’t desperate to convince us that she’s quirky or that her experience is the most important one in the room. But what should be a hard-hitting look at American cast-offs feels instead born to be mild.
Rate & Comment