Review: Single Carrot presents politically charged play by Caryl Churchill
"An Enemy of the People," the vintage Ibsen/Miller drama at Center Stage, takes a couple hours-plus and lots of long paragraphs to make its loaded points. Over at Single Carrot Theatre (it's temporary MICA home, that is), Caryl Churchill's "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" from 2006 packs its hefty sermonizing into about 45 minutes of single words and sentence fragments. Neither work is entirely satisfying in structure and content, and both tend to hammer their points heavily. But the compact, two-character Churchill piece does so in a most intriguing manner, adding a layer of sexuality to the discourse. The playwright focuses on -- takes aim at, most of the time -- the United States and its policies, using a character named Sam (as in Uncle) as a stand-in. Another man, called Jack in the first version of the play, leaves his wife and children to live with Sam. Concerned that audiences envisioned the play as a reference to ... 
The essential element of one man's love affair with America, which becomes the inevitably dominant partner in the relationship, remains the same. The odd mix of elements at work here produce some fascinating exchanges, like this one, alternating between Guy and Sam: love it when you say most destructive power ever in the history of the yes yes and now space stars eternity filled with our love you so more and more The Single Carrot production, directed with a vivid touch by Ben Hoover, seizes on the sensual element in all of this. There is nothing coy about the depiction of these two men, no attempt to keep everything on some heady, symbolic plane. Sam (Elliott Rauh) and Guy (Dustin C. T. Morris) are all over each other from the start. But the sexual tension in the play is a ruse, a disguise for the main business of dissecting American foreign policy, especially relations with dictatorships around the world. In staccato, often graphically descriptive bursts of dialogue, several decades' worth of events are conjured up, from Vietnam to Libya (Churchill could not have known when she wrote this how some of phrases, such as "explosion at the embassy" or "Afghanis turned against us after all we," would carry so much additional weight today). Rauh and Morris are admirably adept at the play's distinctive patter, where thoughts need only be partially expressed by one character and finished by the other. This process could come off as a pretentious word-association game, but the actors achieve an easy, natural flow with it. They also put across the relationship element with equally impressive nuance. Rauh vibrantly captures the seductive, controlling side of Sam. Morris nails Guy's jumbled bursts of doubt, guilt and puppy-like determination to please. There are some strong visual images along the way -- Rauh, alone onstage, reciting an angry litany of torture practices as he furiously slices a couple of carrots; Morris constructing two piles of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that seem of no consequence at all, until the phrase "no no no the towers" is suddenly spoken. "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" runs through Oct. 21. The first several performances were at MICA's Brown Center; the show moves Friday to MICA's Studio Center. PHOTOS BY BRITT OLSEN-ECKER 
The whole progression of an affair -- from being easily physical to easily hurt and back again -- unfolds in telling detail, played out on a simple set. And several lines that might pass by innocently enough (not that there's a totally innocent line in this sparse text) get the most suggestive reading possible.
Categories: Drama Queens, Single Carrot Theatre
