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Shades of nuts
Blue/Orange puts the squeeze on mental healthcare
BY CAROLYN CLAY

There should perhaps be more, or less, Joe Orton in Joe Penhall, whose provocative 2000 satire, Blue/Orange, won both the Olivier Award and the London Evening Standard Award when it debuted in Great Britain. This is a sharply written piece about buzzword psychiatry, economic expediency in the health-care industry, medical egotism, culturally ingrained racism, and the subtle line between certifiable madness and just being a little crazed in a crazed society. But at least as produced by Zeitgeist Stage Company under the direction of David J. Miller, the play is not so mocking as to justify its heightened depiction of bald medical manipulation. Here, with its three characters — two white National Health shrinks and the impressionable young black man who is their Rorschach blot and ping-pong ball — whirling around a pristine desk in a hospital consultation room like word-spinning tigers around a tree, but without the ironical zing of What the Butler Saw, Blue/Orange can seem like a naturalistic sociodrama that’s simply over the top. I was in my car, driving home dazzled, before I remembered it had been billed as a ferocious comedy.

But whether or not the Zeitgeist production makes you laugh, it will certainly make you think — and think fast and for yourself. Regarding the sanity of Christopher, the isolated, economically disadvantaged, oft-agitated patient of African descent who sees the oranges atop his doctor’s desk as blue and claims his dad is exiled Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, Penhall does not stack the deck. Perhaps the young man did subconsciously pick up on Paul Éluard’s surrealistic ditty "The earth is blue like an orange" or peruse the Belgian comic book Tin-Tin and the Blue Oranges. Given the way Idi Amin strewed his seed, Christopher’s claim of paternity may even be true (except that he amends it at one point, claiming to be Muhammad Ali’s love child from the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" in Zaire). Blue/Orange does, however, indict the physicians, especially the senior one, the arrogant Robert, who has quick and heady, medically informed jargon to explain away any symptom that might keep the patient locked up in his overcrowded facility and who is played at Zeitgeist by Steven Barkhimer with a cavalier silkiness that can turn very articulately mean.

The most alarming thing about Blue/Orange is that though Christopher is clearly in need of help, two-thirds of the time the docs are fighting tooth and careerist claw while their likable if paranoid patient is left to battle not only his demons but the unseemly spectacle of a battle that isn’t really about him. At first, you think the conflict is a simple clash of good if naive intention versus ruthless pragmatism, with young, idealistic "registrar" (the Brit equivalent of a medical resident) Bruce pitted against glib, R.D. Laing–spouting "consultant" Robert, who has rank and would like to discharge the patient for economic reasons, not to mention appropriate him to flesh out a book he’s writing about how ethnicity influences mental health and our perceptions of it. (In other words, an incredulous Bruce sums up, "You’re saying Christopher can’t distinguish what’s real from what’s not because he’s black?") But Bruce, too, turns out to be morally schizoid, destructively attacking the patient and in the end giving in to his own inner weasel. Playing the role at Zeitgeist, Eric Hamel, though righteously angry and painfully sincere, doesn’t quite have the quick-tongued polish to put across Penhall’s staccato, idea-chocked script. His accent, too, is an in-and-out thing, whereas Barkhimer provides Robert more English crispness than actual English inflection.

As the alternately cocky and fragmenting Christopher, loose but "jumping like a leaf" in African-designed T-shirt and baggy jeans, Dorian Christian Baucum delivers personality, poignancy, and a buyable Anglo-African accent. (The character was born in Zaire but resides in a huge council-housing project in Shepherd’s Bush, in which neighborhood’s bustling market he was arrested for doing something sexual with citrus.) The dueling of the doctors may not be arch enough to convey the absurdity of Robert’s assertions that insanity is a natural response to "the human condition" or that there isn’t a diagnosable set of initials that can’t be wished away with a fistful of anti-psychotics and the occasional visit of a psychiatric nurse. But Baucum’s Christopher, a blotter for every suggestion of his doctors and a persecutory larger society, cagily embodies the gray zone between neurotic and nuts.


Issue Date: February 18 - 24, 2005
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