D I R T Y - B O M B

A play by Rob Newton Premiered at Fertile Ground Festival - Portland, OR - January 2010

It’s Marion’s 70th birthday and she’s made plans. But her 45-year-old daughter has run away from home and her son thinks a blind giant he met on the subway might be a messenger from God. So birthday brunch with her dead husband will have to wait while Marion goes searching for her daughter and finds a beautiful boy who’s just looking for a warm place in a cold cold world. At the edge of ground zero, a mother, daughter, brother and lover find each other and find it’s not so easy letting go.

DIRTY BOMB, the gift that keeps on giving.

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from the premier

C A S T:

Trish Egan

Paul Glazier

Jason Glick

Elizabeth Huffman

W R I T E R / D I R E C T O R:

Rob Newton

STAGE MANAGER:_Heather Oakes

SET & SOUND:_Jamie Newton

LIGHTING:_Brian Guerrero

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R E V I E W S:

(original story link)

Review: 'Dirty Bomb' explodes the myth of the loving family By Richard Wattenberg, Special to The Oregonian January 24, 2010, 5:45PM Dysfunctional families are a recurring theme in modern American drama. Our playwrights seem both drawn to and repulsed by the domestic battlegrounds that often overtake our dreams of familial peace and love. In the Fertile Ground festival production of Dirty Bomb, author Rob Newton picks up on this preoccupation, but, with the precision of a laser-guided missile, he zeroes in on the often horribly destructive love/hate ambivalent core of many family relations. The Dirty Bomb of the title is, then, not something that a nasty terrorist sneaks into one of our cities, but rather the conventionally explosive nuclear family, which emits deadly energy that spreads pain and suffering far beyond the locus of its initial detonation. We don’t need terrorists to do us in - we are doing a pretty good job on our own, Newton suggests. In this edgy little play, the connection between the personal/familial and the social/national is very clear from the start. The play begins with a sound montage that employs a series of playfully ironic juxtapositions to sketch briefly the political, social, and cultural history of the last 50 to 60 years. With the aural context set by this prologue and a scenic environment consisting of large sections of brown butcher paper and cardboard covered with graffiti-like scrawls surrounding three sparsely represented locations (parental home, studio and outside), the dissonance of the family’s outer and the inner worlds come together. To convey the radioactive staying power of destructive family relations, the long-term horror of this play’s dirty bomb, Newton focuses on two troubled forty-something siblings, Karen (Elizabeth Huffman) and Jamie (Jason Glick), who wrestle with the still-taut ties that bind them to their mother, Marion. Interestingly, Marion, played by Trish Egan, is no tyrant. Despite a rigidly maintained composure and moments of lucidity, Egan’s Marion is losing connection with herself, slipping into senility. Dressed in funeral black throughout the play, she prepares to celebrate her 70th birthday by making it her last. And there lies the problem for her emotionally disabled children. As much as they resent Marion and her intrusion into their lives, as much as they speak of how they dread her 70th birthday brunch celebration, neither seems able to cut the psychological umbilical cord and go on without her. Both strike out in search of emotional ties that will perhaps replace those uniting them to their mom. In fact, both turn to the play’s fourth character, the very earthy, homeless Alec (Paul Glazier), for such satisfaction. The loner Alec has sexual relations with each of the siblings as well as a brief link-up with Marion, but seems to want a shelter from the vicissitudes of street life more than a long-term emotional connection. While Alec is neither able nor willing to give the lost siblings the succor they seek, he is, surprisingly, more sympathetic than any of the three family members. In fact, despite the underlying emotional ties that bind Karen, Jamie, and Marion, these characters with vastly different tempo-rhythms have little real sympathy for one another. Huffman’s high-strung, emotionally erratic Karen, Glick’s lugubrious, self-pitying Jamie and Egan’s terse, generally benumbed Marion never seem to listen to one another, never really seem to connect at all. But don’t be mistaken: this inability is not a production failure but a vivid statement of the play’s central point. The contradictory emotions that torment each of these characters -- especially the siblings -- leave them each completely isolated from one another and alone. This play offers no easy solace for its characters or for its viewers, but the futility it represents is certainly cause for thought. -- Richard Wattenberg

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(original story link)

Trish Egan as Marion / photo by Jamie Newton

Dirty Bomb By Ben Waterhouse 10:47 AM January 25th, 2010 [FERTILE GROUND] A thoroughly perplexing world premiere, written and directed by recent New York transplant Rob Newton, in which a pair of despicable middle-aged siblings drink, scream and complain about their mother, who is rapidly falling into dementia, and the depraved young hustler who seems determined to destroy all their lives. Surreal sob stories about a blind giant on the subway and parents driven to suicide by the atom bomb intrude occasionally. It’s not a bad script, but certainly a baffling one - by the ambiguous end, I still had no idea what any of Newton’s characters wanted from one another. Maybe that’s the point. The production is surprisingly strong for a show mounted without the backing of a company, with good performances from Paul Glazier as the hustler and Trish Egan as the mother, whose old-fashioned dignity clashes with the squalid lives of her children. Artist Jamie Newton contributed a jarring soundtrack of static and famous sound bites and equally disconcerting scenery: hanging panels made from flattened cardboard boxes painted with bold black circles and arrows; a graffitied park bench; a filthy bed; a television tuned to a dead station. Dirty Bomb, whether you like the script or not, is without question an impressive entry into the scene. BEN WATERHOUSE.

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(original story link)

2. Theater in Portland! By Suzi Steffen 22:26 27 January 2010 I know that the absolutely most wonderfulest thing to see in Portland this week is Portland Center Stage's newish Snow Falling on Cedars, but the second most wonderful thing is the mix of performances in Fertile Ground festival (also run by PCS' human whirlwind Trisha Mead, who handles publicity for the theater and this festival at the same time). I saw five theatrical presentations, including two unstaged readings (fun!) and one play that was beautifully heartfelt and thankfully, closing the night I went. I'll say no more about that one. Things I enjoyed: Best from my five was Dirty Bomb (where I randomly, or not so randomly since he designed the set and the sound) ran into artist Jamie Newton before the play. It was my second one of the day, so I wasn't at all overloaded. The piece ran about 80 minutes, I think, and I found it intricately, intimately bleak. Playwright and director Rob Newton (who just started a Twitter feed, and ohmigosh, I just realized that he and Jamie have the same last name; are they brothers?) recently moved to Portland from NY, and it showed in the play's deep grounding in Manhattan. The apartment where most of the action takes place was directly by Ground Zero, according to Newton (Rob), and the jokes about Jersey, Park Slope and other locales brought a smile to my face. The play's funny, sharp, painful, especially when actors Paul Glazier (Alec) and Trish Egan (Marion) take the stage. Marion's about to turn 70, and her children - Jamie (Jason Glick, iffy early on but much better in a late scene) and Karen (Elizabeth Huffman), both failures of one sort or another, can't deal with the idea of her birthday brunch. Marion can't really either. Glazier plays Alec as a fierce con boy and fake innocent who slowly reveals layers of desire and need, who seduces both of the middle-aged siblings and knows far more about what he's doing than he pretends to. He's compellingly disconcerting, a shyster caught up more than he intended to be in the family's mess. Huffman could do far better as Karen; she's angry almost every minute onstage, and angry at the same volume and in the same tone. That grows wearisome. At first, I didn't like the sound, the mash of staticky newscasts and noises from bad news of the past, but I think they might play a part in Marion's slow deterioration, or portray some of what's going on in her brain. I'm also not sure, and would need to see it again to know more about this, whether Jamie's monologue of trauma surrounding a blind giant on the 1 train works as well as the playwright wants it to. Didn't think it was quite as traumatic as the character wanted to suggest. Overall, I found Dirty Bomb rather rewarding (and certainly think it has possibilities for expanded production).

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