Ah, you say, Vietnam — isn’t that a bit dated? And some of Aunt Dan — more the immoral-’70s-club-scene bits than the immoral-Kissinger ones, do have a whiff of mothballs in the bellbottoms. The hour-and-45-minute play is raggedly structured, evolving as it does in fragments from Lemon’s memory, and some parts, including Dan’s bulldozing defense of Kissinger as a man burdened by the responsibility of killing peasants on our behalf, do go on too long. But Shawn’s point — that morality is a slippery slope and that the distance between a decent person and a “monster” can follow a short path of what would seem logically connected thoughts — remains chilling. Certainly it does to him: the flexible ethic of privilege is the theme of this wry, brutally honest writer’s subsequent musings, including The Fever and The Designated Mourner.
Shawn remarks in an “Afterword” to the printed play that it springs from a strict ethical upbringing in the upper-crust home of his parents. (His father was legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn.) He wondered how one’s character might develop if pushed in a different direction. Lemon, whom we meet as a twentysomething invalid subsisting on lime-and-celery juice and readings about the Nazis, recalls a childhood in which a genteel English mother and pressured American dad more or less abdicated, allowing their impressionable daughter to become rapt Play-Doh for their charismatic friend Danielle, “one of the youngest Americans to ever teach at Oxford.” At MRT, Jeanine Serralles, dwarfed by towering glass cabinets full of bottled juices, is a tiny, wide-eyed observer, crouched in bed or on the floor as Aunt Dan weaves her wild, wildly inappropriate tales of grad-school adultery and hedonistic, eventually murderous life on the London club scene (some of which come to life). Then there is Dan’s adulation of Kissinger, which leaves the 11-year-old Lemon clamoring to become the man’s personal slave. It all leads to an aria-like coda in which the adult Lemon, morphing from chirpy to harsh, her wide eyes growing almost demonic, makes a not-unsympathetic case for the Nazis’ honest owning up to their baser instincts.
Melia Bensussen’s production navigates the play’s awkward elements as best it can — though the scenes of ’70s decadence, performed in wigs and period outerwear, are somewhat clownish. (Not the most disturbing one, though.) Tamara Hickey exudes foxy amorality as the mercenary Mindy, and Allyn Burrows, a buttoned-up tyrant as Lemon’s dad, makes night-crawling American Jasper nasty as well as foolish. Carmen Roman is an elegant, boldly scribbled Aunt Dan, almost languid in her fanaticism, for whom Dee Nelson’s loving, measured pencil sketch of Lemon’s mom is, rightly, no match. And you can almost see Serralles’s Lemon, having taken Dan’s warped zeitgeist into a noggin book-ended by barrettes, morphing into a Bad Seed of the mind.
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