Stage Left's "The Day of Knowledge" fails its serious subject

By Chris Jones | Tribune critic

February 28, 2009

In 2004, a group of Chechen terrorists attacked a school in Beslan, Russia. After a standoff with the Russian authorities, more than 340 people were killed. Including 186 children.

Such an inexplicably cruel event can, of course, be turned into a play.

Indeed, after such horrors hit our newspapers, we often need a play to help process them. But a play that builds on the inherent drama of a real-life tragedy, as does David Alan Moore's "The Day of Knowledge," has particular responsibilities to proceed with dignity and honesty.

This Stage Left Theatre production—a depressing and amateurish blend of histrionic acting, overwrought symbolism and painful cliche—does not live up to that responsibility.

I don't doubt that Moore, his director Drew Martin and the seven-member cast all meant this piece sincerely. And there are a very few moments when all the symbolic claptrap recedes enough for us to catch a glimpse of real people, including a moving outsider character played by Amy E. Harmon. There is, perhaps, an actual idea or two lost somewhere in here, under all the wailing and shouting.

But when a drama about an event such as this starts with a woman in a circus-style leotard dressed up as a mime—fake tears and all—and wearing a bowler hat, some alarm bells should have sounded at Stage Left, a theater far better than this.

It would all be darkly comic if its source didn't freeze the laughs in your throat.

cjones5@tribune.com