Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

Local audiences may be shocked by “Brief Interviews” because this fierce show will not have them laughing and mopping their eyes, making this production even riskier and braver than its content. Previously they’ve concentrated on comedy. After the inevitable seduction, and after they have “exchanged the requisite horizontal reassurances,” he is dismayed to discover he has fallen in love with what had been “classified as a strictly one-night objective.” This is clearly not a date show.ġ812 Prods., a young, vigorous company created by actor-directors Jen Childs and Pete Pryor, has made a real name for itself in Philadelphia’s edgy theater scene, using a reliable group of immensely talented and very funny actors. In the final monologue, from Scott Greer (especially good at slick, over-articulate intellectuals), a man describes a woman he picks up at an outdoor concert, a post-hippie New Ager. “All’s I’m sayin’ is that abuse can have its positive aspects,” he says. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is, in regard to Wallace’s books ranked, one of his. The book was published in the year of 1999, spanning a tad over two-hundred-and-sixty pages. In the first, Tony Lawton, who is especially good at crude, grinning tough guys, makes a case for the mind and soul expansion that comes, he argues, through violent rape. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is an easy choice for being one of the best David Foster Wallace novels.

The most powerful and appalling monologues frame the show. The men - ranging from a Yale graduate student who can deconstruct postmodern feminist analysis to a factory worker who uses a birth defect as a sexual sympathy “asset” - are all weirdly, persuasively similar. Telling the truth, which all these characters think they’re doing, turns out to be entirely self-serving: The goal is always to manipulate, maneuver, persuade the woman into bed and then out the door. I love Nabokov, too.” The play begins and ends with the line, “What if you told the truth this time?” A voiceover provides such hilarious and wince-inducing lines as, “We don’t have to - let’s just cuddle,” or, “Oh, wow. On a spare stage with a serviceable table and chair, photographs of many male faces, often in repulsive closeup, are projected onto scrims.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace