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Below the Belt
by Vincent Canby
New York Times
March 15, 1996
Richard Dresser's "Below the Belt," which opened Thursday night at the John Houseman Theater, takes place in "a distant land" across an unnamed desert on an industrial compound that each day turns out 20,911 units of something never identified.
We seem to be somewhere in the Third World. In fact, we're in a dimly realized Fourth World, a surreal territory in which corporate bureaucracy, thinking and deformation of language spell the absolute end of American civilization.
Caught in the system, which is the only one they know, are three men: Hanrahan (Judd Hirsch) and Dobbitt (Robert Sean Leonard), who are checkers, and Merkin (Jude Ciccolella), the head of the department. They are ciphers, updates on the kinds of drones that populated the socially conscious American theater of the 1920s and '30s.
Though they dream of promotions or of going home, Hanrahan, Dobbitt and Merkin are secure if not happy in the pigeonholes they inhabit. They are as unable to communicate with each other as they are with the home office, with their regional director, who exists only as a presence at the end of the telephone wire, and with the workers at the compound whose units they check.
Love has vanished from this world, existing only as the memory of love. Hanrahan lives for his wife's weekly letters, but his desire to return to her is not great. Dobbitt, the youngest of the three men, misses his wife but not her proximity.
Merkin recalls the paid leave he received when his wife died. By the time he got home, however, she had "come back." Though they had a wild several days together, he says, she was never the same again. Having been dead changes a person.
This is the method and the manner of "Below the Belt," which vaguely recalls Vaclav Havel's plays about the political repression and dehumanization of life under the communists in the former Czechoslovakia. Yet there is always something at stake in Havel's work, a residue of spirit that refuses to be absorbed by the faceless system.
"Below the Belt" has a narrative of sorts, but it's essentially a succession of sketches in which, in one way and another, the system always triumphs.
At one point, Hanrahan fondly remembers how, years ago, he made a fool of himself dancing at a company get-together. He found that he was an excellent dancer, but he shocked his associates. Being different was regarded as anathema.
In one of the play's brief moments of life, Hanrahan asks Dobbitt to dance with him. It's a small stab at nonconformity.
Later on, there's another good scene, when Hanrahan, Dobbitt and Merkin watch the workers in the compound celebrate at the Economic Recovery and Realignment Day party, to which they have not been invited.
"I never knew how lonely it would be when I chose to become a checker," Dobbitt says, peeking through a window at the party outside. Merkin tries to be encouraging: "You don't choose checking, checking chooses you." Hanrahan admits that he became a checker in order to spite his father, who thought checkers were "maggots, bloated with the blood of honest workers."
"Any man can work," says Merkin. "It takes an extraordinary man to check work."
"Below the Belt" exults in every cliche spoken by its characters but, unlike Harold Pinter, Dresser never finds the virginal truth the cliche has come to obscure.
As directed by Gloria Muzio, who staged the play's premiere at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky., last year, "Below the Belt" has more style than content. It moves briskly but is less absurdist than silly. Toward the end, the compound is threatened by small, unknown animals, presumably creatures of industrial pollution, whose eyes glow in the dark like miniature headlights.
Hirsch is a very big, humane sort of actor, which may not be the ideal quality for this kind of stylized writing. The role of Hanrahan offers him no outlets for his power. He seems inhibited.
Leonard fits into the role of the callow Dobbitt somewhat more easily. Ciccolella is funny and suitably muddle-headed as someone who has learned how not to rock the boat, but who is always doomed to fail.
Stephan Olson's set design is efficient, as is Peter Kaczorowski's lighting, though there must be a more effective way of suggesting the eyes of the beasts who are about to inherit the earth.
Right now, it seems as if civilization is in the seige of nothing worse than Christmas tree lights that refuse to blink.
