Jeffrey Skinner is a poet, and he writes plays like a poet—that is, long on soliloquies and short on facts, with non-chronological scenes arising from a nebulous void to dissolve before achieving consequence. The only solution capable of redeeming such narrative conceits is for the author to pull forth a revelation of sufficient dazzle to lend coherence to everything preceding its disclosure. Skinner, to his credit, delivers.
In his Down Range, We begin with G.I. Frank Raspoli recounting how Afghani snipers ambushed him and buddy "Doc" Pettibone. Years later, Frank—now a sergeant major—receives news that Doc has died and volunteers to escort the body to its burial site. As the officer in charge of military funerals acquaints us with its protocol, flashbacks show how Frank and Doc met and married the women who would follow them through multiple transfers and deployments, forsaking domestic stability and security to live in a marital limbo engendered by frequent separations. (Beth Raspoli laments her spouse's absence for 40 months—more than half—of their five years together, declaring that HE has "the army, the brotherhood, the great cause, but all I have is YOU!") The husbands, too, find their plans eroding as they adapt to their chosen employment in ways they did not anticipate. A soldier swapping confidences with the ghost of his dead comrade-in-arms is a commonplace literary device nowadays. Also, Frank's quixotic attempts at adopting an orphaned child to comfort the infertile Beth are not wholly implausible. By the time, however, that Doc's wife offers herself to Beth as a mother-surrogate—a scheme involving the adulterous seduction of Frank (who may or may not be privy to the arrangement)—we begin to suspect that these events are occurring within the imagination of one of the characters. The question then becomes, which one?
Running nearly two hours (with one intermission) in the cavelike Preston Bradley Center auditorium, this Genesis Theater production is directed by legendary Chicago expat Kay Martinovich, whose expertise with polemical drama is apparent in the clearly defined devolution of Carl Herzog's Frank and David Lawrence Hamilton's Doc from idealistic intellectuals seeking adventure to monosyllabic, battle-fatigued grunts trudging from day to day. Carey Lee Burton and Whitney Morse also serve as evidence of the adage about military families. ("If the army wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one.")
Skinner sometimes falls prey to stating the obvious, but his insights into the damage inflicted by war upon its affiliates emerge as irrefutable as they are eloquent.
