Ents: Arts

Review: Cracks

By Samuel Valdes Lopez
Published: 05/11/2009

It’s a very hazy 1973 in a Los Angeles mansion, where a massive party is being hosted by rock star Rick (Steven Aspinall), who is murdered in his room while preparing to meet his guests. Ranging from a sleazy porn director to disenfranchised mother, are the stars of Cracks, a social commentary posing as a murder mystery.

Written in 1975 by Martin Sherman, Cracks is not focused on the real identity of the mysterious killer, but more on the quirks and the egocentric personalities of the main characters, a by-product of the now deceased hippie-era from which the cast’s archetypes are drawn.

All characters in the play were well portrayed by the cast, and comprised a veritable check-list of schizophrenics, junkies, jaded musicians and disillusioned dreamers who don’t want to remember the hangover of the sixties. The so-called ‘high-water mark’ is a certain Dr Hunter S Thompson, representing the death of the hippie culture.

As director Rob O’Connor mentions on the play’s booklet, the moniker of ‘whodunit’ could be the first (and clichéd) adjective to come to mind whilst trying to summarise the play. It is a murder mystery with a rather strange conclusion. With a style for misdirection, Sherman instead starts deconstructing the characters, picking them apart with tweezers whilst sending us astray with a few red herrings.

The initial impression you get from each character, via a monologue filmed with a portable camera, changes completely when each of them soliloquises before departing this world.

The solution to the mystery might be unsatisfying, perhaps even anticlimactic, but that’s the genius of the play, as it is more about a statement about the people of a generation and how their worries and fears (peace, love, music, etc) were set in the wrong order of priority (i.e. compared to being picked off one by one by a murderer). It’s a criticism applicable to many a modern ‘do-gooder’ who are not what they pretend.

A pity this little known play has hardly managed to get the same attention as Mr Sherman’s seminal work Bent, so more kudos for SutCo’s choice of play and cast.

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