Stadium Devildare

Stadium Devildare

Running time: 1 hr

Oh, say can you see ... anything but red, white, and blue? Probably not, if your eyes are trained on Stadium Devildare, the latest theatrical creation by Austin's Rude Mechanicals from a script by sometime local Ruth Margraff. Inside the Off Center, almost everywhere you look, those all-American hues are there in all their Old Glory, shading star-spangled banners, bunting, boxes, bulbs, chairs, tires. It's like some Independence Day celebration bulked up on steroids.

And so it is with the combatants in the midst of this patriotic excess. Warrior-contestants in a muscle-bound variation on reality game shows, they compete for the honor of confronting America's deadliest enemy – code-named Godzilla X – while dressed in the supernaturally powered jumpsuit of Evel Knievel; to win is to charge into battle as their country's greatest defender. Their names – Game Boy Palaiologoi, Lone Wolf Reiko, and brothers Dazzler Expo Crenshaw and Dazzler Speed Racer Lamar – may suggest the influence of Japanese culture, but make no mistake, they are the red-blooded, true-blue progeny of Uncle Sam. Their swagger, their aggression, their lust for the win – all belong to the land of the free and home of the brave. Theirs is the trash talk of American sports: the brash boasts, the derision of all opponents, the threats in the language of injury and slaughter, clothed in the certitude that the end justifies the means. Winning is not only the only thing, it's the American way. These characters don't literally wrap themselves in the flag, but they do swathe themselves in its colors and symbols, and combined with their belligerent posturing, it calls to mind the conduct of our countrymen that has alienated so many around the world. When Game Boy says, "I don't plan or exercise. I collectively humiliate," with a tinge of Dubya's drawl in Jason Liebrecht's voice, you can hear pride of country curdling into something rank and ugly, an arrogant, imperial nationalism.

As they fight for supremacy, scheming for an edge and plotting revenges, the four unleash torrents of text, fevered arias fueled by Margraff's astonishing sense of language, words spilling forth at mach speed, sentences in overdrive, their evocative images and provocative meanings barely glimpsed as they rocket toward the horizon. The text is as dense as any in recent memory, and it just keeps coming. The performance of it is virtuosic by Liebrecht, Lana Lesley, Joey Hood, Robert Fisher, and Shawn Sides, and Sides' canny direction, supplemented by Graham Reynolds' thundering, adrenaline-rush score, keeps the work focused and compelling, but there's just so much, so you keep wanting a break, a chance to catch your breath, and none comes.

Perhaps that's part of the point. That in these games America plays – and that means war, too – there is no break. The assault of text eventually leaves your brain numb, unable to absorb any more, perhaps like the violence and rhetoric of victory to which we're subjected day after day, world without end.

The only respite in Stadium Devildare comes late, when the characters of Reiko and Game Boy depart the battlefield. A white curtain is pulled across the stage, blocking the patriotic trappings, and Lesley and Liebrecht, now in white kimonos, climb atop a scaffold. Their characters seek escape the only way left to them, through the taking of their own lives. The scene is in dramatic contrast to almost all that has come before: a coming together of two people in softness and silence. Their discussion of how to kill themselves is awkward and comic and ultimately tender. But it shows just how tragic this harsh, brutal path can be for us. At the twilight's last gleaming, that glorious flag of which we sing appears as dozens of razor-edged eyes from which stream tears of blood.