'Raised in Captivity' is locked in a 1995 cage
Nicky Silver, author of Raised in Captivity, used to be an enfant terrible. Now that he's no longer young enough for the enfant and no longer edgy enough to be terrible, it's hard to tell why BCKSEET, a company with access to enormous talent, would want to revive this 1995 play, which is well past its sell-by date. Maybe it's their thing: Their last production was Eric Bogosian's Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, which also suffers from old-hatness.
Nicky Silver, author of
Raised in Captivity
, used to be an enfant terrible. Now that he's no longer young enough for the
enfant
and no longer edgy enough to be
terrible
, it's hard to tell why BCKSEET, a company with access to enormous talent, would want to revive this 1995 play, which is well past its sell-by date. Maybe it's their thing: Their last production was Eric Bogosian's
Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll
, which also suffers from old-hatness.
Raised in Captivity begins as an absurdist comedy but soon slides into sodden melodrama. The dysfunctional family (is there any other kind onstage these days?) parades its neuroses in ways almost too annoying to sit through. We meet the twins, Sebastian (Josh Totora) and Bernadette (Kate Brennan), at their mother's funeral (we'll meet their mother, played by the excellent Tina Brock, later). Death by showerhead. And how odd, since she preferred baths.
Bernadette's husband, Kip (Andrew Borthwick-Leslie), is a dentist who hates teeth and decides to become a painter, working only in white. Bernadette is a weeper with eating issues. Sebastian, still grieving over the death of his lover Simon 11 years ago, is estranged from everyone and everything, even his therapist (Tina Brock again). His only emotional contact is through letters exchanged with a convicted killer (Nick Gillette).
Well, the plot does what plots often do - it limps along, pretending to thicken: The therapist, suffering from unassuageable guilt, blinds herself; Sebastian recounts a grotesque birthday party with a "fascist clown" as entertainment, and eventually picks up a street hustler who attacks him; Bernadette has a baby; and Kip decides to go to Africa. It's all oh-so-quirky and bizarre.
The cast is terrific, managing under G DeCandia's direction to deliver the mushy dialogue ("Can't we be honest at last, for once?") and to slide between the wacky and the weepy. The set (Jacob Walton) makes clever black-and-white use of the oddly shaped space, although the lighting design often leaves actors inexplicably in the dark.