DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Last week’s offering at Yale Cabaret, Normal, by Scottish playwright Anthony Nielson, has to be one of the more unsettling of its recent productions. […] That scene of physical comedy, while disturbing, was almost lighthearted compared to the moment when Wehner enacts in fantasy a Kurten-style sexualized murder of a woman, a stand-in for Kurten’s victims and wife, as well as for Eva (the one girl Wehner seems to harbor feelings for). The scene is Grand Guignol in its humor, as Wehner tries strangulation and hammer blows to murder the doll-like woman who keeps gasping back to life until finally her eyes go blank. That moment, and when Wehner — at Kurten’s urging — has sex with Frau Kurten, while Kurten bites into an apple with great relish, places the audience in the position of indulging Kurten’s views, not as thrills but as theater. […]

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.