"Cherry Docs" Explodes at New Rep

New Rep’s production of David Gow’s Cherry Docs is a startling, explosive, and touching experience. Both actors must be exhausted – emotionally and physically – by the show’s end, but their efforts are worth the toll it must take. The play and New Rep’s production tackle some of the most complex issues of our time with a compassion and seriousness of purpose often missing from political discourse. The production values are brilliant; in particular, the set and the lighting design evoke a prison interview room layered with complex emotions. The masterful direction keeps the tension high, even at moments of silence.

Tim Eliot plays Mike, a white supremacist awaiting trial for the brutal murder of an immigrant. Benjamin Evett plays Danny, Mike’s politically-progressive, Jewish lawyer. The play thus begins with hatred on both sides; Mike’s hatred toward non-whites (including Jews) is met by Danny’s hatred of Mike’s ideas and actions.

Both actors give excellent, albeit quite different, performances. Eliot endows Mike with a combination of incredible kinetic energy, touches of ADHD, and painful vulnerability. Despite the menace Mike exudes, Eliot shows us a man who is deeply sad and lost rather than evil. Evett’s Danny is a self-contained, cynical workaholic, whose rage boils below a rational, professional surface. He mocks and provokes Mike, ostensibly pushing him to build a better defense for the trial. But we sense that Danny’s rage is real as well as pedagogic. As he comes to understand himself he is able to become something of a mentor and father figure to the childlike Mike.

Mike meets provocation with anti-Semitism, nearly succeeding in drawing Danny down to his own level in some of the most telling moments of the play. Mike’s skill in evoking violence is both instinctive and practiced, as if it is a language he has mastered (unlike the language of court, which eludes him). At one tense, brilliant point, Mike urges Danny to hit him, as Danny clearly wants to do. Mike explains: “It will get rid of the feelings.” Here, finally, we see the reason he killed his victim; it is a revelation that is both upsetting and unsettling.

At one point, watching Mike’s anger and fear spill out on the stage, the patron behind me whispered to her companion, “He could plead insanity.” This conclusion, however, is exactly the opposite of what the playwright and the production seem to intend we learn. The point is that Mike is as “normal” as any of us, certainly as “normal” as Danny, who also hates and fears that which he does not understand. In several monologues Danny tells us of menacing encounters with groups of young people who seem entirely alien to him. “I hate these kids,” he mutters, then: “No. I’m afraid of them.” The problem is not that Mike is insane, but that his fear and ignorance are all too common.

Cherry Docs doesn’t provide easy answers to the problem it presents, but sends us out of the theatre moved and thoughtful.

-- Johanna Ettin & Shauna Shames