Last night's Autobahn at the Playhouse: 8 cast members with 14 separate roles pair up in 7 cars moving at unknown velocities... sound like an Algebra II word problem? 

Words were often the problem in the seven conversations, with some players mute while others did verbal cartwheels, spinning wild or falling flat.  Words escaped the puncture wounds that crucified relationships, self-respect and denial in turn.  Crimes of commission - stalking, debauchery, child abuse, theft - vied with abandonment and smug neglect for sin of all sins in the minds of the audience.  But we never actually got our bearings:  so much to take in and sort out at once.

Discomfiture was, after all, the playwright's intent:

To ask the big questions. That's the job of the playwright, I firmly believe. We are outsiders. Voyeurs. Party poopers.... I spend my working hours looking to pick a fight, to ruin somebody's day at the park... I make trouble for a living.
Neil LaBute, How American theatre lost it

Autobahn isn’t the kind of play you walk out of with the feeling, ‘By Jove, humanity’s gonna make it!’  The words and silences tell a cautionary tale, exhausting us, the rubberneckers, with its flagrant use of truth.  It's one of those plays that shine a giant mirror at the bleachers and send the fans home without a clear victor - unless you count Madame Honesty herself.

I didn't shake the worthy lady’s hand until this morning, after musing aloud about the skinny actors: 'Are they smokers or starving artists or just intensely wedded to their work?'  I stopped.  Cold.  Mute.  Listening.  All my useless blather about the private lives of strangers had me in the hot seat, cruising down the pike on vapid fumes.

There was my take home lesson, 12 hours after the facts.  Words, and other tools we use to express meaning, matter.  Artistry isn’t a nice sideline, it’s the lifeline.  It is survival.  The opposite of cruise control is self control; the discipline of art chooses what to dwell on, what to make out of what life hands us.  If I don’t pursue useful forms of expression, I become the nattering vacuum or the pursed lipped fool observant adolescents roll their eyes at from the back seat.

Art extracts us from the bubble of anonymity.  It deprives us of easy deception.  It allows us to laugh, in concert, as we change.

Photo Gürkan Sengün, GNU Free Documentation License