…. and others sometimes. We just have different flashpoints that move us to various patterns of deception, sometimes achieved by omission.
Ah, what’s left unsaid.
Watching the actor Ed Harris play Edward Carr in Neil LaBute’s masterful one-man play, “Wrecks” is to inevitably face one’s own menu of omission and rationalization. At least that’s what I felt when watching it.
As John Lahr explains in his New Yorker magazine review of the play, “In ‘Oedipus Rex’ the drama is about the search for self-awareness; in ‘Wrecks” the drama is about the lack of it.
In ‘Oedipus Rex’ the King is a victim of the caprice of the gods, and is, therefore, tragic. In ‘Wrecks’, the moral horror arises not by chance, but by choice, and Carr is, therefore evil.”
In the play, Carr observes, “It’s just amazing what we do, as people, you know, to run from the past… God, the swamplands we’re willing to wade through to get around the truth!”. Yet, as Lahr notes, “ Carr is an example of the very thing he inveighs against.”
Watching that play, I couldn’t help but think of our president Bush, admonishing so many
This sounds strikingly similar to Lahr’s conclusion about LaBute’s play. (It) “is not a glib exercises in negativity but a masterly attempt to shed light on the ways in which we manufacture our own darkness. It offers us the kind of illumination that Tom Stoppard has called ‘what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.’”other people about doing the right thing – as he sees it. Warning the “leaders” in Iraq to do a better job and ignoring the effect his continued actions in that country are destabilizing the whole region. That’s led to an inadvertently un-summit this week, where the emperor had no clothes.
Ah the sins of omission - and determined lack of self-awareness.
