Lobster Boy (Dan Dietz)
I find it difficult to connect with monologue based shows. This may be obvious from the way I talked about Empanada Loca or Thom Pain earlier, and I don’t know why this is. The way monologues have to be structured, the actor has to speak to someone, it’s usually the audience, and that often breaks reality with me. In my bones I may feel like this is taking too long, why is this person talking for so long, that can’t possibly need all this time.
Lobster Boy by Dan Dietz is a pleasant near-exception to this. It’s a relatively short monologue (probably around 15 minutes,) that has such an odd and eerie structure to it that I think the author must be asking us to think “why is this person talking” in a way that most other monologues don’t bother with, and then it answers the question in a perfectly creepy way, and while the ending is expected, it still does its job marvelously.
While I assume most people aren’t going to run out and buy the scripts I write about I do frequently try to hold some plot details back to preserve whatever surprise people may want, but there isn’t a good way to get someone interested in this piece without giving the whole thing away, so be forewarned.
An unidentified man stands in front of us and starts telling us a story with weird slides filled with odd text. His story is about two brothers: the younger one can’t feel pain and so it’s up to the older one to do all the jobs around the house where the younger one might hurt himself.
The older brother grows to resent the younger one, and during science class he learns about lobsters, who may or may not feel pain, and the hypothesis that if lobsters don’t feel pain they don’t feel fear. Working backwards the older brother thinks that if he can scare his brother he may get him to feel pain which would alleviate a lot of problems in his life and (he justifies) his family’s as well.
This naturally ends tragically, but the tension is drawn out magnificently as the lecturer explains the entire plan in intimate detail, and the event with equal precision. The mood is discomforting and well established.
What brings this around to a truly haunting piece of theater, one that I don’t think I’ll forget for a long while, is what happens after. It’s probably not a surprise to say that our lecturer is the older brother, but it’s revealed in the final lines of this short play that the audience doesn’t actually exist: that he’s speaking to an empty room, and while in description this may not seem like a great ending, Dietz’s writing, pacing, and the continued strangeness of the slides combine together to give me a feeling I did not expect at the outset.
It’s hard to put into words why Lobster Boy connects with me when so many other pieces have failed, but it did, and I recommend reading it if you can.
