
The Heidi Chronicles
Wendy Wasserstein
F5 M3
Israel Horovitz(Dramatists Play Service)
3.32 out of 5
One act
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THE STORY: An East Indian gets lost on his first day in New York as two teenage punks find him waiting at a lonely bus stop.
He cannot understand English, and the boys have some fun with him-at least it starts out as fun.
But little by little, as the minutes go by and the bus doesn't come, they get bored; then annoyed; then vicious.
It is the very pointlessness of their brutality that makes the play-with its awful final image of the Indian jabbering into a dead phone-so disturbing.
We are convinced that this is exactly what would happen at this particular bus stop on this particular night; we see, again, that violence in the big city is as much a child of ennui as of anger.
And, as the nightmare spell of the play takes hold, and the boys torture their victim with increasing relish, we are brought to a shocking awareness of how thin the veneer of civilization can be-of how close beneath the surface of all men lurks the primitive impulse to hurt and humiliate those whose very helplessness and inability to communicate can only frustrate and enrage.