Review of MONSTERFACE
A Play by Daniel Roberts
Review by Stefan Matthew
Through June 28th
Daniel Roberts’s “Monsterface†at the Irish Arts Center should be applauded in its ambition. Its ambition and expanse, its tapestry of plot-lines, and subthemes renders it a quite courageous production and presents an interpretive crisis for the audience. A tragic byproduct of American Cold Warrior fall-out is that dialectics is not really taught in the schools. I’m not even talking about the Hegel-Marx-Engels-Lenin-Mao variety. Your run of the mill Heraclitus: “Can’t walk into the same stream twice†is absent from our “shared†American sensibility. That combined with an equally brutal onslaught of anti-intellectualism+ pressure of commerce renders ambition risky. Straight up dangerous, actually. This deficiency has everything to do with the danger and ambitious courage of this kind of production. Because we are so un-dialectical in our thought processes, its hard to juggle sometimes a theory of mediation to make sense of all the levels going on in a work of this scope. Roberts must know this—yet, he presents a New York audience with “Monster Faceâ€. This in and of itself should be rewarded.
