`Blasted` depicts a nightmarish tale

New York, Oct 10: Some nightmares are even more vivid on stage. There`s an immediacy to the horror that goes beyond terror and into shock.

And make no mistake. "Blasted," which opened Thursday at off-Broadway`s Soho Rep, is shocking, a play of graphic physical and sexual violence. It`s unnerving in the extreme, which makes the evening`s fleeting moments of human connection all the more potent. But maybe that`s what English playwright Sarah Kane had in mind when she wrote "Blasted" more than a decade ago. It was Kane`s first play, one of five she wrote before committing suicide in 1999 at the age of 28. "Blasted" was derided by many reviewers when it was seen in England in 1995. Yet in subsequent productions, critics found echoes of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter in Kane`s bleak tale of an older man (Reed Birney) and a young woman (Marin Ireland) having an unpleasant assignation in a sterile, anonymous-looking hotel room. The man, a journalist for a tabloid newspaper, personifies misogyny. He`s racist, sexist, homophobic — and slowly drinking and smoking himself to death. Birney gives one of those extraordinary performances that captures this unpleasant person down to the last fiber of his downward spiral. Quite mesmerizing, even in all his hatred. The young woman is seemingly sweet, possibly disturbed and in need of an affection the man assiduously denies. Ireland turns in a touching, almost lost-child portrait. Their relationship is a series of battles, fierce, sexually explicit assaults on each other that leave dignity and, particularly for the woman, self-esteem in the dust. Kane`s dialogue is terse, machine-gun swift and to the point. Its verbal toughness mirrors the play`s coarse physicality — a physicality that descends into brutality and beyond — that permeates the play. "Blasted" is short, some 90 minutes, and switches gears midway through with an astonishing set change (the design is by Louisa Thompson). All of a sudden, we are in the middle of what looks to be a civil war. The hotel room is in shambles and the journalist is being tormented by a soldier, played by the menacing Louis Cancelmi. The soldier details the ghastly details of war and then commits a few new atrocities of his own. Kane draws a parallel between the domestic violations of the play`s first half and the more immediate destruction of the soldier`s actions. The theatricality is undeniable, thanks to Sarah Benson`s astute, tension-savvy direction, but the gruesome doings are hard to watch. By the time the play has reached its conclusion, we find the journalist buried up to his neck (shades of Winnie in Beckett`s "Happy Days") and the possibility of a renewed relationship between the man and the woman. It`s deliberately left open, but the tantalizing idea of credible human contact after so much carnage is one hopeful sign to be savored from this uniquely disturbing play.