Theater J
Washington, D.C.
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These days many politically themed plays descend into “a shouting match between Left and Right,” said Barbara Mackay in The Washington Examiner. Initially, Willy Holtzman’s Something You Did certainly seems like it’s going to be just such a fight. Gene and Alison were young lovers and radicals in the 1960s, until Alison helped plan an antiwar bombing that resulted in the death of a police officer. Fast-forward 30 years: An imprisoned Alison awaits a parole hearing, while Gene has remade himself into a right-wing media mouth à la Glenn Beck. A last-minute attempt by Alison’s lawyer to enlist Gene’s help leads to heated arguments, but Holtzman cools things down with his levelheaded exploration of the New Left of the 1960s, the post–Sept. 11 New Right, and the political battles that shaped both movements.
Basing his characters on Beck and Weather Underground radical Kathy Boudin, Holtzman sets up some “pretty terrific material for the stage,” said Nelson Pressley in The Washington Post. Unfortunately, he then squanders it. The playwright packs the play full of interesting ethical questions, but buries them under the characters’ “mountains of cultural and personal baggage.” Like Boudin, who spent time in prison for her role in two deaths, Alison is remorseful for her crime; she’s also taken aback by Gene’s political transformation. He initially offers to help Alison, but ultimately turns on her. Whether that decision is driven by ideology or “matters of the heart” remains unclear.
It can be hard to get a handle on Holtzman’s characters, since his dialogue often “drifts into speechmaking,” said Tom Avila in the Washington, D.C., Metro Weekly. What saves this production is the performers’ willingness to fill in the missing emotional gaps. Rick Foucheux ensures that Gene is human and “not fully a villain,” while Deborah Hazlett metes out her character’s conflicted feelings in carefully measured doses. Hazlett’s “exceptional performance” affectingly encapsulates one of the play’s central themes—that “some things in the past cannot be undone.”
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