"Safety," by Aaron Riccio

Being a passive observer may be an inherently silly thing, as some of Safety’s characters posit, but I’d gladly sit back and watch such fine stagecraft any day of the week. And no, that’s not just laziness speaking: this is a damn good piece of theater, thought-provoking, entertaining, and—dare I say it—picture perfect.

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Isn’t it funny how guns and cameras both shoot people? Well, no, not really; but it can be a stark and darkly comedic nuance to quibble about. And British playwright Chris Thorpe is really good at it: he’s got a keen ability to go straight to the heart by completely circumventing it. In his brilliant play Safety (part of a trilogy, though it more than stands alone), loose, fragmented, emotionally-wrought chunks of text carry more bite in one little mouthful than any slack-jawed proselytizing. Rather than speak to the ineffable “horrors of war,” Thorpe makes an awkward dinner party into “enemy lines” and treats words as bullets. And while that’s been done before, these characters have not: a war photographer, haunted by his 1/125th of a second stills; his wife, haunted by the realization she neither loves nor knows her husband anymore; and a blissfully ignorant stranger, who just happened to save their daughter from drowning.

And with words as bullets, wordplay is the armor. It’s meager defense for such roiling emotion, but it makes for invigoratingly terse theater. One scene begins with Michael making a mundane comment to Susan, his wife: “You forget, you know.” What follows is a subtle rant on the vagueness of language (ironic, because it only shows how absolutely precise language can be), each point ramming home another of Michael’s faults. Words might allow characters to hide, but not for long, and they certainly cannot cover the discomfort of the speakers.

Given all that sub-text, Safety is a very intelligent play, extremely well-written, to the point where every syllable’s elocution is precise, and both the director (Daisy Walker) and cast (especially David Wilson Barnes and Jeffrey Clarke) deserve credit for managing to execute the enunciation with such vicious charm. “Was that observation or imperative,” asks Susan of Michael’s sparse comment. “It’s just that there are a number of ways to interpret the statement you just made, Michael, and I’d hate to disappoint you by choosing the wrong way.” Lines like these often have a tendency to come across as inhuman or callous—they produce the knee-jerk reaction: “Real people don’t talk like this!”—but I assure you, in these hands (i.e. larynxes), it’s wholly believable.

So too, the progression of scenes: Thorpe shuffles like an magician between the dinner party, an interview turned affair, some out-of-place expository monologues billed as “Michael’s World,” and Michael’s vivid memories of a bombed-out house, somewhere in the Balkans, 1994. It’s seamless, alleviated by a wonderfully chilling original techno score and an eerie sterile white set, whose single wall creeps closer and closer in, giving the verbal metaphor of being “boxed in” a physical parallel. Even better, every scene starts and ends in the middle of something, which speeds the show—already a fleet-footed affair—on.

Being a passive observer may be an inherently silly thing, as some of Safety’s characters posit, but I’d gladly sit back and watch such fine stagecraft any day of the week. And no, that’s not just laziness speaking: this is a damn good piece of theater, thought-provoking, entertaining, and—dare I say it—picture perfect.

Urban Stages, 259 West 30th Street
Tickets (212-868-4444): $15
Performances (until 2/12): Thursday-Saturday @ 8:00; Sunday @ 7:00