Blasted by Sarah Kane
“Can’t always be taking it, backing down, letting them think they’ve got a right, turn the other cheek…some things are worth more than that, have to be protected.”
A Regional Premiere directed by Katherine Owens
October 23 – November 20, 2004 at Undermain Theatre
A middle-aged man, Ian, and young woman, Cate, enter a hotel room. As private and public violation collide their world fragments around them. Acknowledged as the most provocative and influential British playwright of her generation, in her landmark play Blasted, Sarah Kane forges a potent theatrical vision of destruction, collapse, and ultimately, redemption and love.
While on tour in Eastern Europe with their production of Goran Stefanovski’s Sarajevo, Katherine Owens and the company learned of the work of Sarah Kane, a British playwright who committed suicide at the young age of 28. Kane belonged to a group of playwrights created “in-yer-face theatre” which believed that the theatre had a necessity to portray anything and everything onstage; if one said they could not represent something onstage, to Kane that was an act denying something’s existence, an act of censorship. And true to their ideals, Blasted is a play full of brutal content. It begins with two people in an affair entering a hotel room. A war rages outside. A soldier enters, and soon the entire war enters the room.
A play about the opposition of quotidian life and global tragedy, Undermain’s production, one of the first of Blasted in the country (predating its New York premiere by four years), was extremely controversial. The scandal was doubled by it’s production in Dallas in the middle of Bush’s presidency. Critics questioned its necessity in such a time when America too was at war with Iraq, which only brought to the company’s mind the poem of Bertolt Brecht, “In Dark Times”: “They won’t say ‘the times were dark’ / Rather ‘Why were the poets silent?”
