cover photo by Stephen Fazio
"`The nothing that is not
there and the nothing that is.' This line from Wallace Stevens'
poem The Snowman perfectly reflects both the style and the
content of VANISHING POINTS. This play is and isn't a story about
murder. It exists and does not exist as sensational melodrama.
What we see is not necessarily what we get because Martin Jones
is rare among contemporary playwrights: He uses the stage to make
visible the invisible.
Ghosts inhabit VANISHING POINTS,
but not the Halloween kind. Jones conjures up those psychological
specters populating Henry James' The Turn of the Screw—emotions
that refuse to die, grieves that will not stay buried....
Jones avoids conventional
docudrama. His script unfolds in blatantly theatrical fragments,
brief scenes, in a lyrical mix of expressionism and
impressionism. Instead of facts and figures from a typical case
study, here dreams, nightmares and pain assume tangible
shapes....
...this further solidifies his
reputation. With depressing frequency the majority of new
playwrights give us media realism. Too often their influences are
television and film, genres where photographic imagery can
reflect the material world but not the unconscious. It takes a
play like VANISHING POINTS to reveal what only the theater can
capture: `The nothing that is not there and the nothing that
is.'"
Richard Stayton, The Los
Angeles Herald Examiner
"...a stunning
dramatization of a senseless and apparently random act of fate.
The question of `why' is addressed but not belabored. What is
carefully examined, however, are the equally random and bizarre
effects such an act can have. As the mind recalls and recreates
an unexpected horror, it shouts terrified warnings and takes upon
itself the twofold guilt of failure and survival...."
Robert S Telford, The Long
Beach News
originally produced by Mad Horse Theater Company, Portland ME
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