Native Speech

Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader 8/20/92 – ?As much as I like Eric Overmyer’s Native Speech, I can’t imagine a successful production of this impossibly dense script, about an underground DJ and the deteriorating world of junkies, prostitutes, and thugs he inhabits. It’s packed with seemingly endless hip jargon, and not only is the language enormously difficult, but the mad rush of intentionally disjointed scenes proves nearly overwhelming.

At the same time Overmyer’s protagonist, Hungry Mother, is inescapably seductive. This ultimate bad boy jury-rigs a radio station in his basement, broadcasting whenever and whatever he likes, from psychological weather reports (“The weather outlook is for continued existential dread under cloudy skies with low-grade distress”) to made-up reports on where to find the best drug deals and shooting galleries. Hungry Mother’s radio soliloquies simply crackle. His command of his own jacked-up lingo is stunning, and the images he creates become a litany for the decay of “Western civ.”

So Tight & Shiny Productions have certainly given themselves an enormous challenge. Brett A. Snodgrass’s beautifully decaying set is the perfect environment for this play: an enormous slab of concrete floats in the center of an empty black stage. Out of this concrete shoot two steel beams, perhaps 15 feet high, reaching futilely toward nothing (the ceiling of the space is probably 30 feet). On this postindustrial island Hungry Mother’s studio is stranded, littered with old 45s, radio equipment, and various other debris.

The combination of clutter and clarity seems particularly apt. While the play is full of shrapnel from Overmyer’s explosive imagination, each shard is precisely cut to be lethal. From one of Hungry Mother’s news flashes: “Police today busted a waterfront distillery, arresting 27 adults. The distillery produces a wine brewed from the sores of children, which is quite popular locally and in the contiguous states, and is easily available without a prescription.” And Snodgrass’s choice of concrete and steel–the city’s literal building blocks–underscores Overmyer’s interest in society’s crumbling underpinnings.

But unfortunately this clearly defined space throws the rather unfocused quality of director Tim Sullens’s production into high relief. For the most part his cast seem to dredge their way through Overmyer’s language, laboring over each sentence instead of letting each image springboard them to the next. This results not only in rather sluggish pacing but occasionally in incomprehensibility. The larger thoughts, those that carry a character through an entire paragraph or scene, are missing. It’s like looking too closely at a newspaper photograph: the viewer can clearly see each of the individual dots, but no dot has more meaning than any other, and of course the greater picture is lost.

The cast certainly demonstrate great commitment–they’re putting in a lot of hard work, but the work seems misdirected. In a play this stylized and language-oriented, an actor’s diving into the emotions of his or her character is often not as important as finding the place where the language becomes true. It is this truth that will include the audience. By pulling in and dwelling on the play’s dark emotional underpinnings, the cast does not allow the audience in.

In a sense this is a play about language. It’s called Native Speech, after all. These characters should wield language as a martial artist wields nun chucks: in a flurry of dangerous activity, with a good deal of posturing to increase the perceived threat. By not grappling with the ways Overmyer’s characters use language to do more than express their emotional states, Sullens’s actors don’t achieve the kind of immediacy and vitality the play needs to engage the audience.