Mud: The Best Plays are Hard to Find

It looks as though a bomb in a drying machine went off in the Adams House Pool. A broad swath of dirt and trash separates the stage from the audience. In the muck you can spot ruined cardboard boxes and a half-buried rifle. Ancient shirts and shredded pants are strung up about the theatre and lie in heaps at the back of the stage. A rickety table looks ready to collapse under the iron wielded by a young woman in a stained housedress.

Mae stands over her laundry in a wooden room in rural Tennessee. Lloyd sits in a chair near her, shivering under his blanket, devoured by a disease he is ashamed of and afraid to face. There is a perpetual tension between the two; Lloyd is sexually crippled and jealous of Mae, who has been seduced by an unbearable desire to educate herself. Indeed, at the school where she goes to learn rudimentary reading and mathematics, she has met an advanced reader named Henry, and she is falling in love.

So, from the chaos of dialect, of ignorance and of setting emerges the poignant symmetry of a love triangle. In seventeen short scenes, these three characters play out their strange and beautiful love affairs unselfconsciously and without histrionics. The self-assured and bombastic Henry's awkward gift of a lipstick is completely believable, and Mae kissing Henry's mind is the most romantic moment I've encountered all semester.

However, this play is not a simple threeway tug of war. At the end of each scene, the lights flash up for a moment over the frozen actors. As each character's features congeal into an expression of immobility they betray a deeper trouble beneath their loveloss. There we see how terrible it is that Lloyd's jealousy is toppled over the edge by a carefully sounded out description of a hermit crab. We see one hundred and fifty-four dollars changing melodrama into tragedy.

Mud is excellent. Dan Hughes `01, Kevin Meyers `02 and Jessica Shaper `01 shoulder their roles effortlessly. They cut through Fornes' web of sexual anxiety, illness and desire with an unwavering humanity. Though their dialogues are primitive and border on stereotypes, they steer clear of condescension, and the play pushes far past the social limitations of its characters. Mae finds the escape she sought in her children's encyclopedia of sea-life in the play's ability to transcend class and intellect and to relocate tragedy in her simple speech.