Fulfillment susannah flood
Those bedroom scenes have an authentic charge that pulses naturally with the paradoxes of his characters. As they gasp out “I love you” in the throes of passion, they are words less of endearment than of visceral desperation. Foreplay includes his clutching her violently by the throat she likes to be spanked, hard. (As a restaurant patron, he is every server’s nightmare.) Similarly, Sarah is alternately Michael’s salvation and nemesis.Īnd when these two are in bed together, a startlingly rough side emerges. Akinnagbe plays him, Michael is equally likable and abrasive, an amiably self-effacing fellow with streaks of arrogance and impatience. Bradshaw’s refusal to make Michael a blameless victim. What keeps “Fulfillment” engaging and unsettling is Mr. So does an uneasy dinner scene in which Michael is accused of being an Uncle Tom by Sarah and his best friend, Simon (Christian Conn). His encounters with his coyly racist boss, the president of his building (Denny Dillon) and a big-name basketball player (Otoja Abit), whom his firm hopes to sign as a client, have the undercooked quality of microwave satire.
Michael’s journey through recovery and relapse has its arid stretches. And that was before the scene in which the neo-Nazi brother and sister started to … well, never mind. I will never forget the moment in “Burning” (2011), my first Bradshaw play, in which two gay men, discovered in flagrante delicto by their young adopted son, cheerfully invited the lad to join them in bed. “Job” (2012), his provocative reimagining of one of the most provocative books of the Old Testament, portrayed God as a guy of all-too-human capriciousness, while last year’s “Intimacy” was about a wholesome suburban family that stayed together by making pornography together. He has also continued to venture ever further into new frontiers of outrage. Bradshaw has usually obliged, with works that don’t so much wrestle with as wallow in fraught subjects like racism, pedophilia, incest, sadomasochism and hate crime, all presented without a trace of authorial censure. The knowing theatergoer attends this prolific playwright’s work in a state of anxious anticipation, fearing and hoping to be rattled by some fresh violation of the traditionally taboo. Being a shock artist like Thomas Bradshaw carries its own exacting burden.