Back The Night

Play
by Melinda Lopez

Directed by Daniela Varon

Boston Playwrights’ Theater
Boston University, Boston
February 4- 28, 2016

With Melissa Jesser (Em), Amanda Collins (Cassie), Evan Horwitz (Sean), Michael Underhill (Brandon), Stephanie Clayman (The Doctor, The Dean, The Senator), John Koot (Officer Sam, The Reporter, The Other Reporter, The President)

Cast — Melissa Jesser as Em
Amanda Collins as Cassie
Evan Horwitz as Sean
Photo: Kalman Zabarsky
Courtesy of Boston Playwrights’ Theater

An artfully written play, overtly about sex and violence on campus, but subliminally about ends, means, trust, and social change.

Cassie (Amanda Collins), an outspoken female college student, has been wounded in the head, presumably hit viciously by a member of a notorious fraternity.

Her good friends, Em (Melissa Jesser) and Sean (Evan Horwitz) finally get her to go to the clinic for treatment. Afterwards, an inquest ensues in which the search for who might have done this expands into a more generalized campaign about mistreatment of women on campus. The police (John Koot), the college president (John Koot), and even Em’s mother (Stephanie Clayman) who happens to be a senator, all get involved. And yet the question remains: what really happened to Cassie and who did this to her?

This very well crafted play reveals its secrets in stages, subtly and convincingly. Each meeting of characters seems to reveal a crack in the facade, a slight opening into what lies behind the complex dimensions of this story.

Each of the characters is interesting and well-drawn. Cassie, the victim, turns out to have her own agenda, and Em has her own complicated history. Em’s mother has an involved history as well, and she is, in addition, a politician. And Sean, Cassie’s and Em’s close gay friend, has, to boot, his own loaded agenda.

Meanwhile, Em has an ongoing involvement with a fraternity member, Brandon (Michael Underhill), which seems just fine for awhile until that too reveals additional historical curiosities.

Through ongoing inquiry and discussion, Em becomes a principal hub of the moral action and drives the central question about what really happened and why the various people engaged in the story seem not to be communicating straightforwardly.

Oddly, something reminiscent of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex surfaces for me in this play. Though the main question underlying the drama is what really happened and who did it, the sequence of revelations along the way, eked out scene by scene, allows the audience to form a more coherent expectation of the dimensions of the story. In Oedipus Rex, everyone knows how things turn out- the dimensions of that story are clear from the beginning, and here they are not. What makes Oedipus Rex a riveting drama is the artful way that Sophocles unvinds the explanation of how what did happen could have happened. That’s not quite parallel to what’s going on here, but there is a relatedness in Lopez’ manner of revealing small pieces of the story in measured doses so that we begin to understand how the characters act in the way that they do.

All of the actors do a very reasonable job, Melissa Jesser, as Em, holding down the end of inquiry, and Amanda Collins, as Cassie, holding to insistent fervor. It’s an interesting pair, and well embellished by the rest of the cast.

I did have issues with the narrative at the very end of the play, as described below.

Post viewing analysis - contains spoilers

The end of the play is cute but frustrating and not quite true to the play’s dramatic requirements. Lopez’ writing is very good, but in not allowing Cassie to reveal clearly at the end what actually happened is a dramatic liability.

She and Em have just agreed to each reveal the truth about themselves, and Em has given a long, detailed description of her night of debauchery in the basement of the fraternity. By rights, Cassie should have owned up to what had actually happened to her the night of the supposed attack.

Already Em has got a strong sense, even a proof, that Cassie was lying about the attack, and it seems from what Cassie says at the end that it really was a ploy to get attention to the issue of sexual violence and abuse on campus.

But Cassie’s language of doing so is all given in the subjunctive: if it were the case that I hit myself or got Sean to hit me then would it have been that much different than if a fraternity guy had actually hit me? is the nature of her speech.

It just doesn’t come off in the end. Clearly, Lopez is trying to create a sense of moral ambiguity in a way that seems captivating and interesting, but instead it just seems like a game.

The more interesting question, actually, is about the trust between Cassie and Em, and Cassie’s very high falutin’ speech about whether or not she did or didn’t hurt herself for the publicity doesn’t answer that question.

Ultimately, the play is about the very old moral question of means and ends. Cassie seems hard on the side of the ends justifying the means, while Em upholds the stance that truth is the best policy and that trust is centrally significant. Had Lopez been clearer in the end about what Cassie has to say, that difference could have been played out in an important way.

The way Lopez handles it here makes one think about how Hamlet would have been were Shakespeare to have actually maintained a question about whether the prince were crazy or not. In the end, Hamlet’s craziness, for all intents and purposes, is seen as the evidence of a conscientious soul wrestling with uncomfortable truths under desperate circumstances, but if Shakespeare would have led his audience to wonder whether Hamlet were crazy or not would have changed the texture of the play completely, for the worse.

Correspondingly, here, Lopez’ coyness at the end does not serve the dramatic motives of the play well, nor give acknowledgment to the question of relationship, and how trust, betrayed, might very significantly have bearing upon the question of how to enact social change.

– BADMan

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