Hey, George ... duck!
The Neocon Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight—aka The Dubya Crew—is under theatrical attack. Too bad the bombs aren't smarter, the bombardier stealthier. Seemingly on the verge of an ideological meltdown, playwright Sam Shepard aims for shock and awe but his audience gets mauled in The God of Hell, an 80-minute flamethrower too heated for its own good. Consumed by rage and hampered by haste—he raced to get this political rant in front of the public to attempt to affect the last presidential election—Shepard let his passions gallop ahead of his dramatic sensibilities, compromising what could have been an example of one of art's greatest contributions: provoking questions and encouraging independent thought to rattle the status quo.
Shepard has answered perceived totalitarian-bound policies with a piece of dramatic totalitarianism, a work leaving no room for discussion or debate. That doesn't mean the artist should forfeit a point of view. Art without it is merely technique. But when a character literally wraps himself in the American flag, you haven't been persuaded, informed or even forced to think. You've been beaned with a flagpole. He's so incensed, you can picture Shepard pounding this out in one adrenaline-pumped sitting, eyes wild, drool and spittle dripping onto the keyboard.
In theory a comedy-drama—though Shepard wants us to choke on our laughter—The God of Hell is about patriotism curdling into fascism in a scenario that out-Orwells Orwell. It's set in a Wisconsin farmhouse, home of heartland couple Frank and Emma (Jim Williams and Susan Lowe). Frank's a dairy farmer doting on his prize heifers nearly as much as his wife, who putters around nursing her beloved plants. Enter Frank's long-forgotten, extremely jittery friend, Haynes (Joe Hammond, who directed under the name "Jerry Jihad" and assumed the role when original actor Bob Blomgren died suddenly—Blomgren is still listed in the program as a tribute). Haynes takes shelter in the couple's basement, on the lam from some secret government project involving plutonium—when touched, he gives off blue sparks. Then Welch (Ernest Hemmings), a pushy "salesman," arrives, asking strange questions about their house and wheedling his way in through fast talk and force, wearing a stars-and-stripes tie and pretending to peddle patriotic trinkets, complete with American-flag cookies and red, white and blue bunting he strews around their home. As he attempts to indoctrinate Frank, Emma begins to glimpse a frightening future as the obnoxious pest reveals himself as a government thug with a sinister agenda and a taste for torture.
Provocative, certainly, and Shepard's targets are numerous: corporate greed, farm subsidies, even moral relativism regarding torture (we're Americans, we can do it). Dialogue between Emma and Frank about Welch is rife with obvious metaphors for voter cluelessness and administration callousness: "He walked in out of the blue, I don't know how you could have missed him"; "He didn't seem much interested in the truth." When metaphors become too much trouble, Shepard shoves rhetoric into the bureaucrat's mouth unadorned: "Didn't think you could take a free ride on the back of democracy forever, did you? A price had to be paid. ... We can do whatever we want. We're in charge now. No more pesky checks and balances." After transforming Farmer Frank into a paranoid, blue-suited propagandist, Welch declares him "decoded, debriefed, researched and good to go." Runaway Haynes wears a U.S. Army T-shirt, but with the motto, "Yo soy el Army" (un-American bastard!). Torture highlights include shocks to the genitals (C'mon, America, grow some balls!).
The characters are polemics with limbs, the play one long flipped bird.
With material required to be pitched at near-hysterical levels, the cast is up for this strenuous exercise—literally, by the end. Williams and Lowe are at least granted fleeting moments of subtlety, while Hammond and Hemmings are balls-out from the get-go. A massive ball of panic, Hammond has big-man gruffness that detracts from the sense of the little guy terrorized by the bully-boy government, but his presence is electric. Ditto Hemmings, whose neocon monster is a hot-wired horror, a relentless propaganda predator preying on the fear that allows totalitarianism to triumph.
Too bad such performances serve a play that grows less effective the more enraged it becomes. The God of Hell gives us nothing to think about because Shepard thinks it all for us.