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An East Indian gets lost on his first day in New York as two teenage punks find him waiting at a lonely bus stop. He cannot understand English, and the boys have some fun with him—at least it starts out as fun. But little by little, as the minutes go by and the bus doesn'...t come, they get bored; then annoyed; then vicious. It is the very pointlessness of their brutality that makes the play—with its awful final image of the Indian jabbering into a dead phone—so disturbing. We are convinced that this is exactly what would happen at this ...Read More
An East Indian gets lost on his first day in New York as two teenage punks find him waiting at a lonely bus stop. He cannot understand English, and the boys have some fun with him—at least it starts out as fun. But little by little, as the minutes go by and the bus doesn'...t come, they get bored; then annoyed; then vicious. It is the very pointlessness of their brutality that makes the play—with its awful final image of the Indian jabbering into a dead phone—so disturbing. We are convinced that this is exactly what would happen at this particular bus stop on this particular night; we see, again, that violence in the big city is as much a child of ennui as of anger. And, as the nightmare spell of the play takes hold, and the boys torture their victim with increasing relish, we are brought to a shocking awareness of how thin the veneer of civilization can be—of how close beneath the surface of all men lurks the primitive impulse to hurt and humiliate those whose very helplessness and inability to communicate can only frustrate and enrage.
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