Wild Thing
As musical accompaniment during her audition, the very controlled victim of obsessive-compulsive disorder, Ruth, chooses the song titled “Wild Thing.”
The Carving Knife
Justin, the ineffectual and clueless social worker, reveals his disregard for those he is trying to help with the glib assertion that “there’ll be no real trouble: no carving knife against the throat.” In one the play’s starkest visual ironies, later on Cherry will press a knife against Doug’s throat.
Martin and Lewis
A strange bit of ironic humor is inserted into the play when Roy—the manic oversee of the play constantly criticizing the laid back Lewis—compares them to the famous Hollywood comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Perhaps, Roy—who is the patient in the asylum, after all—is just making an observation based on the other’s name or perhaps he doesn’t recognize the irony at all, but the inescapable fact is that Roy is more like Jerry Lewis and Lewis is more like Dean Martin. Silly on the surface, but perhaps it is a moment more telling than it seems.
“An incredible burden, even for brilliant talent.”
The actors are patients in a mental institution. They are being asked to perform an opera. In Italian. Even though none of them can sing opera and none of them know Italian. And if that weren’t enough, none of them are brilliant talents.
Mozart and Vietnam
Mozart’s opera is not the first choice of the director who is goaded into it by Roy, one of the patients. The overarching irony of the play thus becomes how to make an opera written by Mozart about the theme of romantic fidelity relevant to a time when, as Lewis describes it, “love is not so important…in these days…of the Vietnam War.” In fact, it seems like an undertaking only a crazy person would try.
