BULLET REVIEW- “GREATER CLEMENTS” BY SAMUEL D. HUNTER at Lincoln Center/Mitzi Newhouse/ Now in previews
After cramming layer upon layer of unrelenting personal, social and economic misery into Greater Clements, a play about the closing of a northern Idaho mine along with the death of its tiny town and the lives destroyed in the process, playwright Samuel D. Hunter appears to have taken on a further challenge. How to make the audience more miserable? He met this daunting task by making the play three hours long, with two intermissions, bereft of even a shred of humor, vertical steel girders at the front of the stage obstructing views and two scenes where audience members in a darkened house were forced to turn away to shield their eyes from the piercing white light of an actor’s miner’s helmet. Full stop. End of review.
I will let a real critic write about the exceptional and riveting portrayal by Edmund Donovan, of a young man tortured by his crippling emotional illness and the complex subplot of the multi-generational, psychosocial pain of Japanese internment camps.
