A Bill Wood play review

“Angst ‘R Us”

A Bill Wood review.


Last evening I joined the estimable Fitzgerald family at their daughter’s high school play, Blitz, produced by the Lincoln High School Theatre Department.

The joy here was watching a superbly crafted, strongly performed piece by these intelligent, capable students. Scene, lighting and sound (nice work Liz!) were all superb. I think the costume design could have gone beyond colored T-shirts.

Now, content. First, imagine if Ayn Rand had raised Woody Allen. Same neuroses, less hope. Allen would have written Annie Hall without the middle act where two people find love and for a period of time are willing to make the necessary sacrifices and compromises to maintain that love. Instead, the movie would have gone directly from a desperate search for love to a stupid wasting of love for more venal goals.

I don’t know if this making sense. Try this.

Two aliens from Planet Kafka see Blitz as their first taste of humanity:

Urm: These creatures are fairly primitive. They have not yet discovered love. They have the desire but because of universal failure to establish identities and constant carnal lust they all end up suicidal.

Krzc: It appears that their crude chemical compounds cannot halt the inexorable descent into a state of despair.

Urm: We can do nothing here. This species will obviously self-destruct. Let’s go to planet Oxymor. I hear they have five different sexual subtypes.


Well hey. Don’t let me play the bitter elder too long. I knew teen angst. It is the time in life when one gets a free pass to indulge the fantasy that the universe is a cold, lonely misunderstanding place and to enjoy that sweet ache between brandishments of hot self-righteous anger. We’ve all been there. Wouldn’t wanna go back, but been there.

The play was three acts with eighteen mini-plays. The Shockwave Chronicles was woven throughout in five parts and mainly dealt with the quest for emotion, any emotion (and also sex, of course).

Namaste was a three-person play starring Tommie Traylor, Samantha Parsons and the ever-engaging Natalie McDonald. Traylor has become enchanted with Buhddism and is conflicted about playing high school football. Maybe he could do both. Just convince the team not to try for the extra point after a touchdown as a way of making merit and honoring one’s ancestors.

Arrhythmia, consuming all of ACT TWO, was an incisive study of human personality as animal types. As in most of the other vignettes, Sex and Death were buying drinks for each other at the zinc bar, while stumble bum Love was shoved in the alley in her own vomit.

High School Musikill was an outstanding, Broadway-worthy performance of an original score by Victor Henriques.

In summary, it was a SHOCKING performance. I was SHOCKED. But I’m OK now. After digesting the message of Blitz, I have decided to leave my family and wander the barren landscape, confident that I will never, ever find love.