| NY Times review of
NY Production (2005): Passengers
glumly wait out a bomb scare at the airport while back
home their husbands and wives commit adultery and
co-workers hang themselves. A grandmother plots the
death of her daughter's "ethnic" husband while her
grandson terrorizes the neighbors.
The play "Terrorism" was first staged in Moscow in 2002,
then mounted to acclaim the following year at London's
Royal Court Theater Upstairs. It is now playing in New
York at the Clurman Theater/Theater Row.
There are no explosions onstage except metaphorically.
Rather, the play depicts the sort of terrorism that
ordinary people inflict on one another, and the fears
that allow people to terrorize in everyday life.
"Terrorism" depicts people disappointing and then
punishing one another; bosses and colleagues mutually
terrorized in the banal setting that is corporate life;
and law enforcement officers, those society places in
charge of its protection, privately mocking our
vulnerability.
The play's chief hero is billed simply as "Passenger," a
man who in the first scene races to an airport only to
face long delays from suspected suitcase bombs on the
runway. In the second scene, the Passenger's wife and
her lover do battle, sexually and literally, back at the
apartment, while in the third, the hero's employees
grapple with a shocking workplace suicide by one of
their colleagues.
In later scenes, a grandmother schemes how to break up
her daughter's marriage to an "ethnic" son-in-law by
poisoning him, and local police investigating a gas
explosion swap wickedly perverse photos of the victims.
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