Sorting out our Obsession with Violence
Bob Hicks, The Oregonian, January 15, 2007

There Tom Moorman lies, twitching and moaning, blood spurting from his neck onto the kitchen floor, pretty much looking like raw meat.

For a second you think you've dropped in on "CSI: NY" or "Criminal Minds" when the loony-of-the-week's victims are splayed out in all their tortured glory, or maybe the makings of a Damien Hirst slice-o-matic sculpture or an entry in that art show of "tastefully arranged" cadavers in athletic poses, "Bodies: The Exhibition." We do love our blood and gore, and what's up with that?

But back to Moorman, who plays a sad-sack schlump named Junior in George F. Walker's play "Escape From Happiness," and who staggers to his feet at Theatre Vertigo under the browbeating insistence of April Magnusson as Nora, the possibly dotty and definitely voluble matriarch of one strange, twisted family.

There is blood aplenty in "Escape From Happiness," and a few guns, and a guy who gets tied to a chair and darn near talked to death, and other evidence of the cultural proclivity toward violence as entertainment, including a good cop/bad cop routine where you're not quite sure till the end which one's which.

But like another play it resembles, Sam Shepard's artistically more successful "A Lie of the Mind," Walker's "Escape" is less about the violence that sets off the action than the sometimes Herculean efforts of ordinary people to overcome the violence by coming to grips with its roots in the pool of love and hate in which so many families wade. At heart, "Escape From Happiness" is about the difficult journey toward reconciliation.

That clear center sometimes gets muddled in director Melody Bridges' Vertigo production, which opts for a lean, loud, cartoonish tone: It starts at a high pitch and rarely varies, sacrificing the subtlety that might create more emotional shape for sheer propulsion. As a result, you miss some of the quirky dramatic switchbacks suggested in the script, and you're really not sure whether you're supposed to take the thing as a great big joke or as something more piercing and even consoling.

Yet given that tone, Vertigo's production sports some good, edgy performances, including, in addition to Moorman's and Magnusson's, Erik James' as the shell of a dad, Keith Cable's as an old-line cop, Jennifer Healey's as a seriously over-caffeined lawyer and Kerry Silva Ryan's as a gutsy mom with a good idea of what's actually important.

Ben Plont's set, which is literally of the kitchen sink variety, sets the right seedy tone, and Hal Logan provides some effective musical bridges.