Playwright Scott Caan's thought-provoking drama about issues surrounding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has to overcome a pair of whammies--and, in this case, we're not talking about the airplanes that hit the World Trade Center. Not only does the work's close chronological proximity to current events make the issues Caan is trying to address too searing to be easily assimilated at this moment, but, paradoxically, the work's rage over the attack's aftermath already feels a little past its sell-by date. We've moved on from the visceral anger the writing evidences, and the play already has the mood of a period piece.
Following the collapse of the World Trade Center, young slackers gather at a Hollywood coffee shop to voice their anger and pain. All the men are affected by the attack on America, but the most wholly consumed by his anger is Matty (Mark Pellegrino), who bawls his inchoate fury by calling for an all-out war on the Middle East. More pragmatic is Matty's best friend, easygoing professional bookie Vic (Val Lauren), who chooses to ignore the attacks and go about his business as usual. As the two men debate, Matty's apolitical younger brother, Sean (Caan), steps in to act as mediator--and to flirt with the attractive coffee clerk (Danielle Wolf).
Caan eloquently and evenhandedly frames the debate about the appropriate American response. This is one of those politically charged plays that have the viewer agreeing with everything each character says, even when the statements are polemic opposites. Yet, at the end of the day, the work is also alarmingly overwritten: Although it contains enough material for a crackling good one-act play, the show lumbers on for two and a half hours, with endless digressions and padding.
And while Caan's arguments crackle, they ultimately aren't enough to entirely sustain the show, which suffers from the lack of a strong overall plot. In fact, aside from the characters yelling at one another, almost nothing happens at all; director Robert Carnegie's job of depicting the dawdling lifestyle of a coffeehouse klatsch is almost too effective, and the staging feels suffused with inadequately reined-in emotion. Still, Carnegie has assembled vibrant and febrile actors who deliver urgent and nicely intense performances. Pellegrino's elementally pained Matty is only the slightest exaggeration of American post-Sept. 11 rage, while Lauren's genially oily Vic is surprisingly sweet and appealing. As the levelheaded Sean, Caan is likable and charismatic--and, in the supporting role of a smug left-wing peacenik, Douglas Cavanaugh is suitably loathsome.