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The Indian Wants the Bronx:
An East Indian (played by Navroz N. Dabu) 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 as the minutes go by and the bus doesn't come, they get bored; then annoyed;
then vicious. 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. It's Called
the Sugar Plum: Zuckerman, a college student, ran over and killed a young
man riding a skate board. As the play opens he is in his room pasting newspaper
clippings into a scrapbook, humming contentedly, as he listens to a report of
the accident on the radio. There is a knock at the door. Joanna, the fiancee of
the dead man, enters in tears of accusation. After her initial tirade, it's not
long before they end up in each other's arms, quarreling over the amount of
space devoted to each of them in the newspaper's report of the accident.
Zuckerman's outrage during the quarrel seems to be the only emotion he feels,
whereas shedding tears is no problem for Joanna. But what amuses and disturbs
them most is the chilling speed with which their instinctive self-concern
overcomes the grief of the one and the guilt of the other. |