With "Down the Road," playwright Lee Blessing adds the last installment of what will certainly be viewed as his trio of social-issue dramas that began earlier this year with "Two Rooms" and "Patient A."
With “Down the Road,” playwright Lee Blessing adds the last installment of what will certainly be viewed as his trio of social-issue dramas that began earlier this year with “Two Rooms” and “Patient A.” The previous productions, staged by the Signature Theater Co., dealt with political hostages and AIDS, respectively; “Road” takes on the grisly specter of serial murder. While Blessing doesn’t really offer any novel insights on the topic, he has again turned headline fodder into compelling theater.
If Blessing has a penchant (and a skill) for probing his chosen issues with intelligence and respect for their complexity, his dramatic style is clear and simple.
In “Down the Road,” married journalists (John Dossett and Lisa Eichhorn) are conducting a series of jailhouse interviews with serial killer William Reach (Eric Stoltz).
At first elated about the career prospects of writing what is sure to be a best seller, Iris and Dan Henniman — and their marriage — begin to unravel as they record the gruesome details of Reach’s crimes.
Drawn into the lives and deaths of Reach’s young female victims, the Hennimans, expecting a child, are haunted by their complicity in providing the sick Reach with a national forum.
Action shifts from the desk and chairs where the prison interviews are conducted to the young couple’s equally dreary motel room.
Blessing allows each character full opportunity to speak his or her mind: While one journalist interviews the killer, the other is observed in the motel dictating observations into a tape recorder.
The strain becomes apparent in the increasingly obsessive dictations. While Iris becomes fixated on a discarded water heater outside the motel, Dan spends hours contemplating the significance of America’s highway system.
Blessing’s play becomes a bit too schematic, with Iris’ water heater a too-obvious symbol of the cultural disposability and individual valuelessness that she believes are at the heart of serial killings.
For Dan, the cause is rootlessness, and if both of these explanations have been offered before, the husband’s speech about the construction of the highway system and the concurrent rise in serial killings is no less chilling.
As for Reach, he calls his crimes killings, not murder, because “murder has motives.” He is inexplicable evil personified, an unrepentant killer and a self-aggrandizing liar.
Director David Dorwart underscores how Reach’s evil — Reach’s reach, that is — insinuates itself into the lives of the journalists by having the killer join the couple, unseen, at the motel, commenting on their comments.
Dorwart draws fine performances from his cast, particularly Dossett as the haunted journalist whose ultimate defense is callousness.
Eichhorn does well charting the course of a tough writer who finds her conscience, and Stoltz is at his best conveying the glib charm of the killer. He is less effective in suggesting the unsettling layers of evil within Reach, but Blessing’s blunt dialogue picks up the slack.
At 100 minutes, “Road” seems a bit hurried in its abrupt ending, and the final husband-wife debates are too obvious and preachy for maximum impact. Even so, the somber play works its way under the skin of the audience as surely as its killer invades the lives of his interrogators.
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Down the Road
Atlantic Theater, New York; 99 seats; $25 top
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