Massacre (Sing to Your Children)

If ever there was a show to “second-act,” this is it. Even though José Rivera’s allegorical drama kicks off with blaring electronica, blinking lights and blood-covered killers decked out in scary Donnie Darko–style bunny masks, the first part feels as DOA as the offstage victim, Joe. But things definitely liven up when (spoiler alert!) Joe is resurrected after intermission.

After seven friends living under a repressive regime slaughter the man they held responsible for their imprisonment, they party, puke, get it on and recount his horrible deeds in tedious, profanity-laced soliloquies. Rape, pedophilia, murder, the erosion of free will and thought—Joe did it all. But when he returns from the dead, he forces them to confront their own secrets, sins and general culpability.

To be fair, Massacre might make a compelling show and was well received in an earlier incarnation at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, but director Brian Mertes’s interpretation is flawed. The play isn’t meant to be taken literally; it should strike the audience in the head, not the gut, and get you thinking. Yet Andromache Chalfant’s set looks like something out of the Saw franchise, and most of the actors playing the would-be revolutionaries are grossly miscast and generally seem lost. Only the intense Anatol Yusef commands the stage as Joe, which is kind of fitting for a despot.—Raven Snook