In “Hunter Gatherers”  playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb gathers two couples, longtime friends, for their annual anniversary dinner, and then turns them loose to hunt one another to extinction. This is a genuinely outrageous black comedy in which the thin veil of civility, of common decency, is rapidly torn aside and the characters are revealed as animals whose base appetites and essential brutality is fully unleashed. Very smartly written, this is a drawing room comedy in which a declasse Oscar Wilde meets a more contemporary, even more crude Joe Orton. Director Desdemona Chiang has a firm grasp on this play and pushes everything just as far as it will go, while keeping the characters shocking and preposterous but never ridiculous. The solid, well-balanced cast draws each individual distinctly while keeping the power dynamics and thematic conflicts clear. This show is often very funny, but it leaves you with a rather distressing taste in your mouth, a taste of blood and bitterness.

It begins with the blood sacrifice of a lamb that is to be the centerpiece of Richard's extravagant dinner, thus introducing Richard as a primitive, brutal predator whose thirst for blood is no greater and no less than his thirst for domination, especially over his guests, since he already holds it over his wife, Pam. For his friend, the rather delicate Tom, that means not only being subjugated in a ritual wrestling match, but being totally humiliated and nearly raped, emasculated by Richard physically as he has long been emotionally emasculated by his domineering, unfaithful wife, Wendy. From Pam's first action, holding the lamb in a cardboard box so her husband can slit its throat, Pam is the “nice” person always trying to see the positive side of everything, always believing that “if you can't trust your best friends...” and ultimately discovering that you can't trust anyone and that in domination there must be subjugation, and in asserting your own identity one will almost certainly, perhaps necessarily, destroy someone else.  

Everything in this play begins in familiar extremity, the commonplace of marriages that are ill-formed and further distorted by time, and is immediately exaggerated to the edge of absurdity. It is not absurdism in the theatrical sense because it is not meaningless, and in that retention of the possibility of meaning we are given a comedy built on a plausible, if almost unthinkable circumstance, a serious play about preposterous things uncomfortably within our reach. 

The ensemble is excellent. Patrick Allcorn is a big, imposing man who creates a sense of always being slightly larger than the room he's in. He also pushes Richard's persona (both within the play and within the character) right to the edge of the cartoonish, making his mean-spirited insecurity both threatening and ludicrous. It's no wonder that he's sexually attracted to Wendy, a woman of equally large stature and equally assertive hungers. Hannah Victoria Franklin plays Wendy as a woman of flesh, and Richard's hunger for her feels perfectly fitting with his other carnivorous desires. She is so much stronger and so much more dominant than her husband, Tom, that it feels like we're watching an especially cruel alley cat toying with a little gray mouse, tossing it back and forth between her claws and never quite willing to bite down. 

The challenge for Ricky Coates in playing Tom is to not allow him to be too insipid, too insubstantial. He's not. He is a physician who uses his hands to heal, to stop the bleeding, to make the world better and to prove that people can be guided by their better instincts. That Richard never entirely defeats him, and that he never entirely capitulates to Richard, gives him enough substance to make him an admirable partner for Pam, once she is aware of Richard's infidelity and corruption. What Montana von Fliss does with the character of Pam is truly remarkable, the outstanding performance of a well-balanced ensemble. She is so decent and kind and filled with light that from the very beginning she is the one person for whom we can will a good resolution, the one hope that civility might be enough to overcome savagery. She is also a technically skilled comic actress, her physical comedy in perfect control and expressive as only the body can be. The sex scene with Tom in the second act, when she finally gets (literally) on top of the situation, was incredibly funny and theatrically revealing. She really is the center around which all of this centrifugal action revolves, and the heart of the thematic questions the play asks. 

“Hunter Gatherers” will certainly not be for everyone, but it is the deftly mounted work of a talented, accomplished playwright who demands attention. I think it is a quite better play than “boom” which had a very successful run at Seattle Rep. It is an outrageous comedy with deeper intentions than simply to outrage, a raunchy escapade looking at some essential definitions of our values and motives. Once again, Washington Ensemble Theatre brings an adventurous, challenging new work to its audience. This one is well worth seeing.

PICTURED ABOVE: Montana von Fliss, Ricky Coates, Hannah Victoria Franklin & Patrick Allcorn in "Hunter Gatherers".

PHOTO BY: Victoria Lahti.