THE STORIES: The first portion of the triple bill,
Victoria Station, is a brilliantly funny yet eerily chilling dialogue between a bewildered taxi driver (who may have gone mad) and the exasperated dispatcher who is trying, without success, to direct him to a waiting fare. The driver, who says he has fallen in love with the passenger who is asleep (or perhaps dead) on his back seat, doesn't seem to know his own location, much less that of Victoria Station. (2 men.)
The second part of the program offers a choice: either
Family Voices (which was used in the London production) or
One for the Road (which was presented in New York).
Family Voices is a series of parallel monologues between a mother and son in the form of letters probably written but never mailed, in which the facade of a happy family gradually disintegrates into a cauldron of recrimination. (2 men, 1 woman.)
One for the Road, a powerful statement about the abuse of human rights by totalitarian governments, finds an unctuous and "civilized" interrogator humiliating the doomed members of a family who have become enemies of the state. (2 men, 1 woman, 1 boy.)
The final play,
A Kind of Alaska, is a masterly study of a middle-aged woman waking up from a coma induced by sleeping sickness after thirty years have passed. In her mind she is still sixteen, and her attempts to fathom the changed world into which she reemerges are not only poignant and emotionally charged but, in the end, devastatingly brilliant theatre as well. (1 man, 2 women.)
