Thursday, November 20, 2008

Say Anything « countercritic:

Daisey also has a gift for connecting history to our present experience of the world. Through shear slight of word, he is able to posit that the American experience of terror predates 9/11 by about sixty years, and is of a more self-inflicted source: a single atomic detonation in the sands of the Trinity blast area, a place where, today, things like praying, or talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki are prohibited by privately contracted security masking as military personnel; where everything is outsourced, leaving the center empty.

And it’s this emptiness that Daisey seems set against. Whether it is the hushing of personal expression at Trinity, or the lack of music during the part of a Bradbury documentary that shows the footage of the first mushroom cloud (a cliche that is also used, I believe, in John Adam’s Dr. Atomic), Daisey, through his performance, gives voice to the many experiences of life that we so often have no words to express. One monologue after another, Daisey fills those terrifying nodes with feelings, thought and reason, even for the most unreasonable realities.