Review of "In The Eyes Of God".

In The Eyes of God -Lori Triolo & Nadine Wright

Written and directed by Raul Sanchez Inglis.
A Black Box Theatre production.

At The Black Box Theatre until Saturday, December 11

The acting is excellent, and Raul Sanchez Inglis's script is chock-full of taut scenes and tough, funny dialogue. For the most part, the plot is engaging. But it becomes a bit of a superficial and voyeuristic game.

In many ways, Inglis's text reminds me of David Mamet's work. Like Mamet's play Speed-the-Plow, In the Eyes of God criticizes American capitalism by looking at Hollywood. Two top-dog agents, Tench and Fargus, lose a client, a screenwriter named Edward, to a competitor called Linne and her assistant, Judi. That sets up a turf war that has truly grisly consequences.

Like Mamet, Inglis writes speech that's funny largely because it is so unabashed and vigorous. "You grab life by the balls and you squeeze the blood out!" Julius, Tench and Fargus's boss, tells them. "I call him a product because I care," Linne says to Judi about Edward. There's emotional nuance here, too. Edward's wife, Andrea, meets Judi in a steam room. Andrea is falling apart, thinking of leaving Edward, and she pleads with Judi, who is a stranger: "I can't see my fucking hands in front of my face, so please tell me your opinion." The politics get provocative, too. In his defence of corporate America, Tench declares that its critics might as well piss on veterans' graves or go to Auschwitz and tell Jewish jokes.

The script's shiny brutality is extremely well realized in this production, which Inglis has directed. Every role is beautifully cast and flawlessly executed. Lori Triolo's carnivorously ambitious Linne is particularly impressive, as is Scott Miller's darkly clownlike Fargus. I also appreciated the sociopathic charm of Ben Ayres's Tench, the icy survivalist stance of Nadine Wright's Judi, the baffled moral compromise of Graem Beddoes's Edward, and the desperation of Christie Will's Andrea. The bombastic evil of Frank Cassini's Julius rounds it all out.

But I started to have trouble with the story when the weapon emerged. And I got really uncomfortable when two of the characters used a hammer to bash the teeth out of a corpse's head and people all around me laughed. In questioning what all of this violence was in aid of, I realized that the script had pretty much shot its thematic bolt in the first few scenes. In the opening exchange, Tench and Fargus use binoculars to watch a guy with a huge cock fuck a woman in an apartment tower across from their offices. Then the two agencies get into the fight over Edward. Within a few moments, we clearly understand the play's relationship to the misogyny, alienation, and greed of Hollywood. After that, the unfolding of the story is all about increasing the extremity of the theatrical experience. For what? Titillation? Inglis's plotting is clever, but it doesn't take us any deeper into his themes; it entertains but desensitizes us to cruelty.

In that way, Inglis's work is unlike Mamet's. Still, the craft in every aspect of this show is admirable