MORAL IMPERATIVE
Nothing is inherently good or evil…
Review by F.X. FEENEY
“Sweet!”
As we near the end of 2016, and I’m revisiting a wide variety of films and books, and one of the experiences I most enjoyed was “Moral Imperative,” a new play by Samuel Warren Joseph that ran for a number of weeks here in L.A.
The setting is an Ivy League campus. The opening conversations are tense and urbane, and the story, as it gathers to pitch, has a healthy dose of melodrama. A distinguished professor plots with a nervous protégée to murder a colleague. “Nothing is inherently good or evil,” Seth the elder reminds Robert, the younger – twisting Spinoza to his own agenda.
Why murder at all? To protect their turf: This interloper, named Oscar, was a classmate of Seth’s back in the day, and while adventuring in the world has matured into a blustery, self-entitled mediocrity whose annoying self-confidence has won him the presidency of his old alma mater – thus fatally displacing Seth, who had every reason to believe the job would be his.
Oscar has also been, Kissinger-like, a driving “professorial” force in Washington, advising a set of unspecified U.S. atrocities in Central America. This kind of death dealing gives Seth the “moral imperative” to do away with him. “How much harm do you have to do to others, to justify having your own life taken,” he argues. Or is this just a high-minded excuse? Robert worries aloud that it might be. Once they have forced Oscar into a fatal corner, deprived him of needed medication, and pile atop him with a pillow to speed death to its target – a moment of powerful theatrical horror, in context – Robert’s once low-key worries mushroom into all-consuming terrors over what he has so weakly consented to be part of. Seth by contrast armors his conscience, turning himself into a demon of certainty. The two ultimately make a poignant pair – and this feeling is a marvel, arising as it does against the steep odds of their venomous aims. Opposing them are the play’s three women. Mary and Karen (Seth and Robert’s wives) and Pauline (a homicide detective catching a troublesome scent) are each uniquely adversarial. Given the patriarchal social realities of this campus and its arenas, their capacities to act on what they suspect are of necessity limited. Yet, as a dramatist, Joseph challenges his own material to ensure that these characters are never mere foils. By a well-traced attrition they each push back and force these men from hiding. “Moral Imperative” builds beautifully to its desolate closing moment.
I’ve wanted to celebrate this play sooner, but saw it the last night of its L.A. run, less than a week before the 2016 election. For a time my enthusiasm was buried in the sleepless aftermath of THAT freezing avalanche. As time passes, however, my memory of Sam Joseph’s drama grows all the stronger, and – as I’m told a New York production is presently being discussed – the relevance of “Moral Imperative” to what’s going on in the world feels all the more vital. Right and wrong are self-evident even to Seth and Robert in their worst moments, as they are to the women they love and ourselves in the audience. The tragic insight of the play is that morality is a battle of perception, ever subject to self-justifications – and with these, self-deceptions – of relentless energy.
P.S.: “Bitter Lemons” gives us three options for rating the show, “Sweet,” “Bitter Sweet” and “Bitter.” I’ve clicked “Sweet” because it seems like the strongest kudos, though the hard and even bitter wisdom so brilliantly mapped in this play is anything but “sweet.” Such are the limits of ratings! Rate it SUPERB.