Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Justice needs a witness, the scholar Paul Woodruff wrote.
A body of witnesses makes possible a communal healing of wounds.
These traditions of public judgment, he asserts, are the ancestors of tragic theater.
then of attention: Here we are together, publicly acknowledging these wounds.
That said, theres a lot packed intoWatch Night.
Josh is headed to Charleston, after a fictionalized version of the shooting there, to get the scoop.
Saul is constantly texting Josh to advise him against the venal path hes treading.
Here, the show would seem to be setting up for the stock cynic-grows-a-conscience story line.
Shayla is grappling with whether shes capable of forgiveness, Josh with whether hes capable of repentance.
The path for both looks grim.
Similarly, Josephs lyrics tend to get trapped in repetitive eddies.
In the wake of all his strutting, his fretting I have no story / Im broke feels false.
AsWatch Nightitself exemplifies, these stories areextraordinarily difficult to stage effectively not exactly commercial-box-office catnip.
That subcutaneous muddiness pervades the show.
But beneath these broad strokes,Watch Nights arguments are woolly.
Take Ms. Summers (Jill Paice), the Wolfs tenth-grade English teacher.
Paice plays her as one color regretful and demure and its an opaque one.
And, again, shes saddled with unhelpfully trite ideas.
Murder he wrote, replies Shayla, in total seriousness.
WhileWatch Nightaspires to the communal witnessing of tragedy, it doesnt take us anywhere in the process.
Its so burdened by its own pall that it ends up walking in place.
Its vocabulary is its tragedy its presented in the language of the colonizer because the colonizer won.
The play may [have] to do with language, but its about people.
Its big ideas come to us through bodies, their desires, their self-deception, their heartbreak.
He blows back into town full of breezy charisma and belief in progress.
But while Josh and Saul are singing ciphers, Owen and Manus are complex and whole.
Of course she dreams of escape; of course she wants to learn English.
Lieutenant Yolland is a kind of Freddy Eynsford-Hill whose Eliza is Ireland.
But then Friel gives Yolland and Maire a love scene.
Its delicate, humorous lyricism is another embodiment ofTranslations big-souled complexity.
