Man From Nebraska Redtwist Theatre
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But the seventh scene has him up in the middle of the night, hanging on to the bathroom sink, and sobbing and shaking—as the stage direction puts it—”insuppressibly.” When Nancy insists that he tell her what’s wrong, he replies, “I don’t believe in God.” Ken being a devout Baptist, that’s a crisis profound enough to make him question his entire sense of self. He decides to go off alone and think things over. He flies to London, where he was stationed about 40 years earlier, when he was in the air force. Home for Ken is suddenly a place he’s from.
The two have a bunch of structural and expressive elements in common, but the main resemblance is that both are about white, middle-class, American guys—avatars of the status quo—who, shaken loose from their familiar lives, venture into unknown territory and are transformed. Mamet’s thirtysomething Edmond comes home from a visit to a fortune-teller and declares to his wife that he’s had enough, the marriage is over. He then heads for the street where he meets multiple variations on the theme of hustler, learns the law of the jungle, and practices it with unusual ferocity. He enters hell and finds an odd equanimity there.
