A Leeds, England, couple checks into a hotel for the night. Ian (Bryan Jennings) has one emphysemic lung, a leopard-spotted liver and prefers calling the staff “wogs” and “niggers.” Cate (Hillary Calvert) is a demure, sensitive girl who still lives with her mother. (Guess which one is the cynical journalist.) Ian spends Act 1 badgering Cate for sex, while she clings to celibacy and a vegetarian menu.

Into this happy scene a little rain must fall, in the guise of an errant Balkan soldier (Ryan Harris) who has apparently arrived in town to teach complacent Britain a thing or two about the price of war. The Rude Guerrilla Theater Company tries hard to bring Sarah Kane’s 1995 diatribe against modern political apathy to life, but the playwright’s moral keening, provoked by Western indifference to Serbian atrocities committed against Bosnia, requires earplugs, and her show’s rapes, cannibalism and cigarette smoking merely add to the bludgeoning.

Director Dave Barton makes good use of a small space, although his post-apocalyptic set design in Act 2 (nicely accompanied by Dawn Hess’ lighting) is more convincing than the tidy hotel room that first greets us. Jennings really puts his actor’s shoulder to the wheel in this production and is always watchable in a thankless role. Calvert is a little too tenuous a presence, however, while Harris’ deranged soldier suitably mirrors the room’s condition at checkout time. Rude Guerrilla Theater Company at GTC Burbank (in George Izay Park), 1111-B W. Olive Ave.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 6 p.m. (no perf July 4); thru July 25. (818) 257-4952. Written 07/01/2004 (Steven Mikulan)

BLASTED Our rating: 3 of 4 stars.
Where: GTC Burbank, 1111-B W. Olive Ave., Burbank.
When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays;
through July 25.
Tickets: $15 to $20. Call (818) 257-4952 (no one under the age
of 17 will be admitted unless accompanied by an adult).

In a nutshell: British playwright Sarah Kane offers a graphically violent, sexually explicit indictment of the human soul that has given itself over to war. It is as valid as it is difficult to watch.


Before british playwright Sarah Kane ended her own depression-plagued life, she left a searing legacy of five savagely intense plays. Many critics lambasted her work as utter perversion, especially her initial work, the graphically violent and sexually explicit "Blasted."

As a guest production of GTC Burbank, Orange County-based Rude Guerrilla Theater Company's staging of this work doesn't shy away from Kane's uncompromising anti-war intent. As directed by RGTC artistic director Dave Barton and performed by a ferociously committed three-member ensemble, "Blasted" burrows relentlessly into the depravity that overcomes men's minds and bodies when they have given their souls over to war. As a live theater work, the play is as engrossing as it is difficult to watch.

Set in a supposedly posh hotel room in Leeds (crudely realized by Barton), the opening act follows the dubious exploits of alcoholic, chain-smoking Ian (played by Bryan Jennings), a middle-age local journalist who is dispassionately chronicling the ritual slaughter of a would-be model and a sadistic car dealer's exploits with an underage prostitute. Having dispatched these tawdry news stories, Ian focuses his attention on hotel guest Cate (Hillary Calvert), his simple-minded ex-girlfriend, whom he proceeds to bully, abuse and eventually rape when she adamantly refuses to have consensual sex with him.

Jennings and Calvert are not too fluid with their British accents but are painfully believable in their actions, especially when Cate's teeth wreak her bloody revenge on Ian's groin. Playwright Kane zeros in on her primary agenda in the second act, introducing a military coup that completely takes over the city and a war-maddened soldier (a riveting portrayal by Ryan Harris) who takes over Ian's hotel room. Spewing the invective, "Our town now," the soldier is singularly committed to Ian's humiliation, which includes a graphically violent rape that the soldier tops off with the barrel end of his pistol.

It would be easy to dismiss Kane's focus on human degradation as merely gratuitous, but she has a telling point to make. In a deceptively civilized exchange, the soldier confesses to Ian about his war crimes. "You should be telling people," he demands of the journalist. Ian says with a shrug, "This isn't a story anyone wants to hear." But when the soldier offers a revoltingly detailed description of the murder and torture of his girlfriend by enemy soldiers, Ian agrees, "Your girlfriend, she's a story."

As the play ends, the soldier is dead and Ian is dying, relying on Cate to brave the war-ravaged city to provide him sustenance. Since Cate is the only character capable of generosity and the only one capable of holding a position of power without abusing it, she is playwright Kane's answer for the survival of civilization.

InformationCopyright © 2004 Los Angeles Daily News

RIP IT TO SHREDS

Visceral, violent ‘Blasted’ tears at its world to get at the heart of humanity

~ By PATRICK CORCORAN ~

            It is one of the bitter ironies of civilization that civilization itself makes large-scale atrocities possible. Bombs, bullets, machine guns, and warplanes require a sophisticated and organized society to manufacture them. The Holocaust was made fiendishly efficient by a first-class railway system and IBM punch-card technology to process its victims. Abu Ghraib was preceded by a phalanx of highly educated lawyers with memos.

            In Sarah Kane’s Blasted, a small-scale domestic combat set in a Leeds hotel room explodes into a massive funhouse-mirror image of itself, its personal cruelties magnified into war crimes. Santa Ana’s Rude Guerrilla Theater Company’s painful and polished L.A. debut deposits this bloody continuum of cruelty in its audience’s lap, but leaves its onstage victims on a strangely hopeful note.

            Ian (Bryan Jennings), a 40-ish tabloid hack specializing in tidy narratives of sex and violence, and Cate (Hillary Calvert), a younger woman without discernible prospects and with a propensity for epileptic seizures, revisit their failed relationship in one of            those blandly sleek midscale hotel rooms you can find in any city.

Ian is an intelligent lout, railing against the soccer thugs and non-natives he sees taking over English life. (He is Welsh.) Chain-smoking and guzzling Scotch, he’s a disinterested spectator in the race between what will kill him first, lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver. Cate is scarcely present, with a bovine acceptance of her circumstances and an equally cattle-like stubbornness.

            Ian professes love but is only interested in sex, the prospect of which he constantly undercuts with casual cruelties and indifference. He blows smoke in her face, orders meat sandwiches though she’s a vegetarian, and endlessly mocks her mental slowness.

            After one of her seizures, he takes the opportunity to relieve his pent-up desires and indulge in a rape fantasy by thrusting against her inert body, his ever-present revolver held above her head. When he comes, she bursts out laughing.

            The next morning finds her with bloody panties--a memento of too-rough sex --and her reciprocating by biting his penis and spitting the blood on him during a blowjob amid another macho reverie (in which he imagines himself a government killer). For Ian,            there is worse to come.

            The hotel room (and the Pinter-tinged naturalism of the play, full of silences and disconnections) explodes suddenly in the midst of a war zone. A Balkan-accented soldier (Ryan Harris, a chilling specter of cruelty and despair) bursts in and vents his fury on Ian, raping him, sodomizing him with the loaded revolver, and ultimately gouging out his eyes and eating them.

            That’s before somebody eats the dead baby.

            Kane is intent on showing us what we would rather not see, despite our tabloid obsessions with the small-scale perversions that are always around us. She slaps that sort of self-delusion away and gives us the elemental (pace Warren Zevon): sweat, piss, jizz, and blood. As a practical matter, it’s questionable whether the viscera and violence have their intended effect. At best, the theatrics flatter an audience into believing it knows what the real thing is like; at worst, they’re shameless manipulation.

            Still, director Dave Barton perfectly expresses Kane’s mastery of allusion: The exploded hotel room is alternately King Lear’s blasted heath, Beckett’s Endgame, Eliot’s Wasteland. Despite the bodily fluids, language and scene structure are the play’s strengths. The verbal dislocations and silences drive Blasted’s rhythms more forcefully than the staccato outbursts of brutality.

            Kane tears down her miniature civilization piece by piece, shredding illusions along with flesh, until the only thing remaining is need.

            Here is the playwright at her most powerful, as her two battered survivors start again with the building blocks of society: two people sharing food, drink, and two simple words: “Thank you.”

            07-14-04

KCRW Arts & Culture: Theatre Talk

 This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk.

[...] Also receiving its L.A. premiere this summer, is another notable work by a female playwright that many people have called sick.

            Sarah Kane once described her first play, Blasted, as a "peaceful play about hope," a work that shows how the seeds of war are planted in normal everyday events; London critics, however, described Blasted as 'a disgusting piece of filth' and 'a systematic trawl through the deepest pits of human degradation.'

            Make no mistake, Blasted does not provide a casual evening out at the theater--it is a profoundly disturbing work, one that includes graphic depictions of fellatio, frottage, urination, defecation, rape, eye gouging and cannibalism.

            Blasted premiered in 1995--the year that Damien Hirst won the Turner Prize, Britain’s most coveted award for visual artists. Hirst was famous for his works that consisted simply of dead animals floating in formaldehyde. When he took the prize, it opened the floodgates for shock art. Naturally, Hirst and the other Young British Artists of the 90’s were denounced, like Kane, but eventually this type of shock art became more or less accepted. Much of this was due to the high-prices these works earned in auctions,  but it also stemmed from the lack of depth or true feeling behind much of the art. Sliced sheep segments and pornographic mannequins are shocking, but they are about as profound as bumper sticker slogans and the minute the shock wears off, the work becomes harmless kitsch.

            Like the Young British Artists, Kane clearly felt that audiences in the 1990’s needed a jolt; but unlike much of the "Sensationalist" art, Kane’s plays don’t have an ironic twist that lets viewers off the hook. Her work is not about shock for shock’s sake. Blasted is a deeply felt and brutally articulated theatrical essay about violence in the so-called civilized world. Not everyone will agree with Kane’s vision, but it is hard to ignore the assured dramatic hand and burning intelligence behind the words and actions.

            Those theatergoers daring enough to want to experience Kane’s depiction of hell as a hotel room in Leeds, should make their way to Burbank this weekend to catch Blasted in its first production here in Los Angeles.

            The staging, courtesy of the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company, is not ideal, but more than serviceable for those wanting a taste of Kane.           

Dave Barton’s set design is simple, but effective; however, his direction of the actors, both in their vocal interaction and blocking, is often confusing, None of the three actors makes much of an impression, which is problematic because Kane’s work demands strong personalities who can break through the rubble of mayhem that the playwright literally fills the stage with.

            Watching this production, one can clearly see Kane’s intense outrage, but one can also see Kane’s immaturity. […] Blasted should be viewed as work that shows talent and promises greater things to come. Sadly, Kane was to write only four more plays in her            brief career. Four years and one month after the premiere of Blasted, Kane hung herself […]

Entertainment Today

reviewed by

Travis Michael Holder

It’s not hard to understand why Sarah Kane, the gifted young playwright who wrote the highly controversial anti-war play Blasted, committed suicide; her personal demons dominate this piece with an almost palpable  omnipotence. Her work, at once poetic, brilliant and prophetic, is also totally horrific and completely twisted. Orange County’s much talked about Rude Guerrilla Theater Company now makes an auspicious and courageous Los Angeles debut with the California  premiere of the 1995 play, which sent shock waves through London when it premiered there only four years before the clinically depressed Kane did herself in at age 28.

               Disgruntled, world-weary journalist Ian (Bryan Jennings) takes his ex-girlfriend, the mildly retarded Cate (Hillary Calvert), to an expensive Leeds hotel room (“I’ve shat in better places than this,” says Ian) for an evening of gin, verbal and stomach turning physical abuse—who ever knew that mutual oral sex could be a bloodsport—and a re-examination of the most dysfunctional romance since Sid and Nancy. But as if their time together isn’t a repugnant enough, they are visited by a brutal, unidentifiably East European soldier, who forces his way into the room at gunpoint and regales Ian with hideously vivid stories of his wartime torture of his enemies, then rapes Ian with both the barrel of his gun and his own naturally attached weapon before gouging his captor’s eyes out with his  teeth. All this happens just before the peaceful hotel room is totally decimated to nothing but dusty rubble, destroyed in an explosion, and the starving blinded Ian resorts to squeezing a dead infant until it audibly “pops” in a desperate effort to engorge himself on its entrails.