Carter Lewis's small-scaled exploration of the currently terrifying generation gap at first seems conventional and correctible discord, but with surprising inexorability it becomes an explosion of heartbreaking hopelessness. We know that Gloria (Annie Fitzpatrick) is trying to convince herself more than to convince her husband Clay (Skip Greer) that she feels only anger at her son Danny, still uncommunicative upstairs as the couple prepare a meal on the patio. Danny has evidently produced a gun in school and been sent home. When Evie (Magan Wiles), Danny's annoyingly sulky girlfriend arrives and says that her mother can't join them, the blood on her neck raises suspicions -- ours as well as Gloria's.
Most of the ensuing action consists of getting the food on the grill, then on the table, and resisting communication. But the rifle shots from the woods above the patio change things. Danny is firing at the house. And he's in serious trouble. Later revelations about Evie's mother's death, plans (including maps of the school) to use that gun they got off the internet to counterattack after school bullies have mocked and beaten up Danny too often, and hints about desperate final measures the two teenagers have decided upon are, I guess, surprising. But what may be shocking is the mixture of love and antagonism between the characters and the sense that they can't, and we can't, understand what these desperate kids are thinking. I suspected Evie of manipulating the never-seen Danny into misplaced violence, but I gather that she is intended to be the play's tragic heroine. What Carter Lewis has done here, with first-rate help from the three actors, director Tim Ocel, and the designers' unusually detailed production, is insure that this disturbing melodrama is uncomfortably real. Even Danny is real without ever coming down to join the three who remain sitting and eating and unwilling to look at one another anymore.
