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We begin with brutality too, a kind so common that its loathsome dullness has become routine.
She has Jesus, Leo quips.
But theres tension in Diggss shoulders and something flickering rapidly behind his eyes.
She and Leo are half of a foursome.
The hints that Parks is doing something beyond contemporary realism are subtle at first, but theyre there.
It matters that, for all its New Yorkiness, the city the friends live in is never named.
And it matters that, as Leo tells us early on, the couples used to be swapped.
Leo and Misha were dating, as were Dawn and Ralph.
And then we all broke up and … got reconfigured in different ways.
For a year, the machines innocuous hissing helped him sleep but it also clouded his brain.
He couldnt paint, couldnt make anything.
When we meet him, hes still in a rut.
I am aware that I have internalized the hate, Leo explains.
Not on every level but on some.
So, Im going to go through it.
And Ill purge myself … And then …
I will be truly free.
Her key in of a person is the do-gooder, a role she inherited from her parents.
Diggs smolders at the center of the show.
Whether he ends up breaking through or simply breaking thats the question.
Hes from Sri Lanka, Ralph whines to Misha after melodramatically interrupting the broadcast of her show.
Hes dark-skinned and identifies as black.
Which, yeah, okay.
Its so totally annoying … A second-rate person has my job just because that second-rate person is black.
Because his father beat his mother and left when he was young, Ralph grew up poor.
He believes hes earned everything he has, and that he deserves all of it and much more.
But in his teenage years boom!
There was that windfall from his dad.
I have this fear, he splutters to Dawn, in my stomach.
The skin on my feet is crawling.
And the ground underfoot is shifting.
And I dont know who I am.
And the only thing I know is that I know the horrible truth: Life.
That, Ralph, is known as not getting what you want.
Pull up a chair, stay awhile.
Sure youd do it but youd feel sore, right?
Thats just what were feeling.
Were just a little sore.
Its kind of a big sore, actually.
But the wound isnt exclusively Ralphs.
Amazingly, hes managed to take possession even of the right to be the injured party.
That our momentisin fact amoment not a death but a guts-rearranging transformation.
But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
White Noiseis at the Public Theater through May 5.
