The Evildoers (review)

On 16 September 2001, President Bush told a group of reporters: “We will rid the world of the evildoers.” Appropriating Bush’s term as the title of his play, David Adjmi (pronounced ADJ-mee) demonstrates instead that the true enemy of the United States is none other than ourselves. Similar in approach to Adjmi’s other new play, Stunning, The Evildoers creates a rarefied world of manicured, pampered, and entitled individuals who represent all of America. His bourgeois characters look like glittering monsters from afar, but resemble ourselves in their emotional neediness and sense of longing. Adjmi, acting as the madman that Artaud demanded for the theatre, attacks American solipsism through an uncompromising look at individuals focused on wealth, verbal battery, and sham attempts at self-actualization.

The Evildoers, like Stunning, opens with a scene of smartly choreographed cross-talk among a group of close friends. Adjmi’s characters insulate themselves behind their own barrage of clever, articulate chatter, whether it be that of the stifling Syrian-Jewish enclave in Stunning or the ambitious, greedy jet-set of Manhattanites in The Evildoers. Jerry (Stephen Barker Turner) and Carol (Johanna Day) are celebrating their wedding anniversary with friends Martin (Matt McGrath) and Judy (Samantha Soule). As the two couples talk over and around each other, exchanging zingers and contradicting ideas, their personalities emerge: Jerry, a psychologist-cum-overgrown frat boy; Carol, cruel and derisive, dressed in black leather; the withdrawn Martin, who explodes in a paroxysm of distress and hatred because of the cynical superficiality of his friends; and Judy, primly poised in a sweater-set and smiling effervescently. Adjmi’s characters, inhabitants of a rarefied upper-echelon who hide existential pain behind a blissful marital façade, resemble Edward Albee’s, but the similarities end after the first act. Adjmi instead pushes his characters into an apocalyptic scenario that departs so radically from the initial realism of the play that it forces, rather than convinces, the audience to recognize its own national spiritual crisis.

The Albee-esque dialogue in this play is meant to get at the marrow of their lives, but the characters avoid the truth by ducking behind even more clever, trenchant commentary. They are all over-educated and articulate; they use language as a weapon to strike out or to defend, but never as a tool for assistance. As a psychologist, Jerry should be able to help Martin, but his alcoholic ramblings reveal a messy amalgam of Freud, religion, and popular science. It is painful to watch Martin depend on him for help, only to have Jerry’s training reduced to drunken drivel. Martin, at the end of one outlandish therapeutic session, hesitantly concludes from the mishmash of Jerry’s constructs: “We’re quarks? . . . and Christ wants us to be quarks? . . . but we think we’re Russian dolls?”

Their ability to bounce antagonisms off one another anesthetizes them from their own humanity. Riccardo Hernandez’s glossy set design completed this tenor of New York edginess: the penthouse apartment, with glass walls and ceilings, situated the characters in a large terrarium—a hothouse with rare orchids on the windowsills and neon lilac lights outlining the casements. These four people were curious specimens, were stuck in their austere world of New York money and surrounded by sleek surfaces—taupe leather couches, glass-topped tables, a chrome bar—--that corresponded to their outer shells.

Stephen Barker Turner (Jerry), Matt McGrath (Martin), Johanna Day (Carol), and Samantha Soule (Judy) in The Evildoers. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Jerry fatuously analyzes America’s malaise as an inability to be truly liberated: “People aren’t authentic, that’s the problem, you know.” He inadvertently sends Martin on a journey to seek his true self, which results in Martin’s discovery that he is gay. Martin begins wreaking havoc on Carol and Jerry’s life as he picks at the façade of their marriage. Newly convinced that his friends, too, need to reveal their authentic selves, Martin challenges them about...