The ragged structure of “The Poor Itch,” an unfinished play by John Belluso now on view as part of the Public Theater’s Lab series, gives the audience a moving insight into the complexities (and the frustrations) of the playwriting process. The loose ends take on larger meaning too, as this story of a disabled Iraq war veteran’s emotional struggles goes in any number of directions, suggesting the lighter and darker possibilities any life may contain.
Mr. Belluso had not completed work on the play at his death in 2006, at the terribly young age of 36. “The Poor Itch” was in development at the Public Theater at the time. The script has been assembled from several drafts by the director Lisa Peterson, the dramaturge Mandy Hackett and the actors, most of whom had been involved in prior stages of the play’s development.
Putting together “The Poor Itch” for a public performance has clearly been a hard labor of love for the artists involved, and they have succeeded in infusing a cobbled-together text with authentic theatricality. Drafts of the same scenes are played in succession, with an actor announcing the switch to a different version. A bell is rung to signal a rough transition to the next scene or a fragment of another draft. Several passages, particularly in the last act, were still being sketched out. In these cases an actor reads a description of the action or a note from Mr. Belluso describing his intentions, ending with the words “Scene unwritten.”
But despite the admirable and intelligent work put into it, both before and after the playwright’s death, “The Poor Itch” remains an unachieved play. Mr. Belluso had not resolved central questions of structure, plot and style when he died, and definitive choices have not been made for him.
His compassionate understanding of the central character, a 22-year-old paraplegic Iraq war veteran named Ian, comes through vividly. (Mr. Belluso had a rare bone disorder that required him to use a wheelchair since the age of 13.) Still, Mr. Belluso had not dug deeply enough into Ian’s conflicted heart for the play to bring new insights to a tragic story increasingly covered by journalists since disabled young soldiers began coming home from the war.
Christopher Thornton, who stars as Ian, appeared in two of Mr. Belluso’s previous works. His friendly, wonderfully unfussy performance does much to bring the character to persuasive life. A spine injury has left Ian in the care of his mother, Coral (Deirdre O’Connell, earthy and terrific), a nurse whose ease with her son’s disability is touchingly natural.
Picking up his relationships with his best friend, Curt (Michael Chernus), and Curt’s girlfriend, Erica (Susan Pourfar), is more complicated. Ian and Erica had been having an affair before Ian left for Iraq; she was supposed to tell Curt but didn’t. Now she’s pregnant with Curt’s child.
This doesn’t stop either of them from engaging in casual drug use. Curt immediately hits on the idea of selling some of Ian’s pain pills for profit, a plan Ian shruggingly agrees to. Meanwhile Ian turns for affection to Katie (Alicia Goranson), the bleached-blond-and-tattooed visiting nurse hired to give him physical therapy.
The plot takes these relationships in several different directions, but we don’t get very far down any particular road, emotionally speaking, perhaps because the everyday story is just one of several layers to the play. Ian is also visited by dreams of his experiences in Iraq, some benign and some violent.
One recurring image finds him drifting down the Tigris with his buddy, the highly literate McGowan (Marc Damon Johnson), and the ghostly figure of an Iraqi translator they worked with, who sings songs of Iraqi history. More nightmarish recollections eventually reveal that Ian took part in an interrogation involving waterboarding.
Mr. Belluso was clearly embarking on an ambitious attempt to dramatize how traumatic injuries — and post-traumatic stress disorder — wreak havoc on the lives of Iraq war veterans and their families. News reports have made the painful currency of this topic gruesomely clear in recent months.
But “The Poor Itch” remains sketchy and unfulfilled, despite the fine work of Mr. Thornton and the rest of the cast. At one point Mr. Chernus reads a note Mr. Belluso left on one of the drafts: “Ian sees his wound and subsequent disability as a punishment, a kind of curse. Ian’s unconscious searches for the answer to the question: Why did I torture that man? What kind of human am I?”
Those agonizing questions certainly cannot easily be resolved, onstage or in life, but Mr. Belluso did not get close enough to articulating them in the play itself for “The Poor Itch” to be effective in the form he left it.
THE POOR ITCH
By John Belluso; directed by Lisa Peterson; sets by Rachel Hauck; costumes by Gabriel Berry; lighting by Ben Stanton; original music and sound by Robert Kaplowitz; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Jenny Gersten; director of production, Ruth E. Sternberg. Presented as part of the Public Lab series by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director, Mara Manus, executive director. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village; (212) 967-7555. Through March 23. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
WITH: Michael Chernus (Curt), Alicia Goranson (Katie), Marc Damon Johnson (McGowan), Piter Marek (the Singing Translator/Ensemble), Deirdre O’Connell (Coral), John Ottavino (Delay/Roberts/Ensemble), Susan Pourfar (Erica), Renaldy Smith (Vince/Ensemble) and Christopher Thornton (Ian).
