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This article by Simon Saltzman was prepared for the February 13,

2002 edition of U.S.

1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.

In New York: `Brutal Imagination’

The horrifying details of the crime committed by South

Carolina mother Susan Smith are given a pretentiously lyrical, but

also compelling, resonance in "Brutal Imagination," the work

of poet Cornelius Eady, with jazz composer Diedre Murray and director

Diane Paulus.

Susan Smith was charged and convicted in 1994 of the deaths of her

two young sons, Michael and Alexander, ages 3 and 14 months

respectively.

She strapped them securely in the back seat of her car that she then

pushed into a lake. The incidents surrounding the case are depicted

through an abstracted fiction laced with factual reportage.

The most powerful fiction is called Mr. Zero, the black man that Smith

invented for the authorities when she needed a fast and credible

scapegoat

for her conduct. And it is Mr. Zero who becomes the catalyst for

recounting

events through editorializing and poeticizing.

"Brutal Imagination" serves less pointedly to consider Smith’s

state of mind. This is dramatized from an emotionally cautious and

intellectually distant perspective. Mr. Zero, however, is a vivid

creation, one who fits Smith’s description to the police of the black

man in plaid shirt and knit cap who, she claimed, jumped into her

Mazda, gun in hand, taking her and the boys as captives.

The play is a series of monologues that have been culled, edited,

and transposed from a cycle of poems by Eady, enhanced with media

coverage. Exceptionally well acted (considering the limitations put

on them by the play’s structure and style) by Sally Murphy, as Susan

Smith, and Joe Morton, as Mr. Zero, the phantom black threat. Morton’s

character has an ironic twist and is allowed to engage us with a

gallery

of black stereotypes, giving us a brief, albeit redundant, history

of racial prejudice.

We see Smith as a composite of the fears, biases, and prejudices that

presumably come with the territory. Murphy’s most stirring moment

comes as she reads from the kiss-off letter sent to her by her married

boyfriend. Although the creators would like to make us quiver at the

thought of how easy it was for Smith to con the Southern detectives,

the fact remains that it took only nine days for them to break the

case and get a full confession from Smith.

"Brutal Imagination" uses mood music effectively and the stage

is provocatively set with an artistically conceived pyramid-like

construction

consisting of various parts and pieces of a car, a baby carriage,

and other debris. The set, like the text, is soon scattered about

and unlikely to shed more light on this case than we had before we

arrived. Two stars. Maybe you should have stayed home.

— Simon Saltzman