Dysphoria, a state of feeling unwell or unhappy, chases through the mildly surreal, often absurd, world of Nick Hoover as he wrestles with deteriorating health, narrated hallucinations and a manic belief that his son, Billy, is in grave danger.
For Nick, time moves forward as Billy begins a week at a Christian summer camp and backwards in flashes of revolution, war and polarizing politics. His faltering logic and frenzied liberalism, symbolic of the befuddled post 9/11 Democratic Party, culminates in his own gripping leap of faith and the proleptic reverberations of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
At its core, DYSPHORIA, a fast-paced, visually stimulating play, examines the uneasy coexistence of secularism and fundamentalism in America. It suggests the future by examining the present and past. Its angst and honest violence butchers apathy’s false comfort and the notion that a unified politic can be brokered between the far left and the far right. |
