Necessary Targets (review)

The world premiere of Eve Ensler's play about women managing the aftermath of war-time atrocities in Bosnia opened in the early days of active US military involvement in Afghanistan. Traditional and chronological in structure, the play follows two American therapists who go to Bosnia to help refugee women recover from trauma. One is a wealthy New York psychiatrist in mid-life, well known for her work with eating disorders, who lacks all experience with refugee populations and—with her designer nightgown and pampered hygienic habits—seems initially quite ill-suited to the work at hand. Played by Shirley Knight, the character J.S. is the most changed by ensuing events. The other American citizen is a young trauma specialist and expatriate who never stays long in any given location but has considerable experience with international crises. At first her hard-nosed practicality renders her sympathetic, but it quickly emerges that Melissa (Catherine Kellner) is a "story vulture" whose highest priority is tape-recording traumatic personal accounts for a book she is writing. The pressure she exerts precipitates a crisis, and her own volatile feelings about her exploitation of the women she is supposed to be helping induces her to leave the camp abruptly, headed for the latest crisis in Chechnya.

The five other characters are all refugees, living together and doing their best to look after one another. Nuna (Maria Thayer) is a hip urban teenager of mixed ethnic heritage; Seada (Marika Dominczyk) is a young mother who refuses to accept her baby's death; Jelena (Alyssa Bresnahan) is deeply in love with her husband, who has been undone by her rape. She accepts his beating her as a reaction to his own impotence. Azra (Sally Parrish) is an elderly woman displaced from a rural village; and Zlata (Diane Venora), a doctor in her own right, is the most skeptical about outside intervention. The play moves from a framing scene in New York where the two therapists size each other up to the refugee camp in Bosnia, where they are to conduct group therapy. A series of ensemble scenes are punctuated by two-person confrontations. It is Zlata who refuses to accept the role of victim and who, despite her resistance, praises J.S.'s handling of the crisis that develops. Once J.S. acknowledges the limitations to the do-gooder posture she initially held, a real relationship of mutual respect is possible between the two physicians, but J.S. recoils from the intimacy of touch and returns to her Park Avenue life, changed, confused, and challenged by her encounter with the refugees.

Music provides the bridge for the most genuine contact between characters. In one case, this is a Madonna song on cassette that Melissa shares with young Nuna; in another, it is a lullaby that J.S. sings in an attempt to comfort Seada when she has a breakdown. The most joyous and transcendent scene involves the women drinking and dancing together. Michael Wilson's direction of the all-female cast won him high praise in local reviews and captured the kind of abandon into physical release that women sometimes share outside the gaze of men. John Gromada's sound design effectively incorporated ethnic music, helicopter sounds, Bach (important symbolically as the source of J.S.'s name), and urban cacophony. Scenic designer Jeff Cowie used the thrust space in predictable ways to indicate multiple locations and Susan Hilferty's costume designs flirted with stereotype but provided significant character information. This may have been unavoidable, given the somewhat typed nature of the roles as written.

It is only in the final moments of the Hartford production that the imaginative, non-literal potential of the theatre as a form is activated. Necessary Targets is very much in the tradition of the well-made play, centered around one character's arc, in a method-based acting style that involves limited direct address to the audience and precludes an actor stepping out of...