Fate of that Dang Cockroach!

Fate of the Cockroach?

In the production Fate of the Cockroach by Tewfik Al Hakim, there seemed to be a lot of whining and scurrying about, but little meaning. It is much like life in the sense, there is a lot of talking about the problems in society but little action. Maybe that is the point of this production, parody. The problems I found in this play were that there was little to care about. I didn’t care about the cockroach that was taken by the ants. I didn’t want to know why the king was the king. The Queen was way too narcissistic and the minister of defense was a whiner. I felt as if I was on a bad acid trip at an even worse cocktail party. I have been to a number of theater productions and have never cared less about a group of characters than in this production. There is a possibility that because it was a Saturday afternoon and I felt cranky for having to be at this play and not doing other things I wanted to be doing, that is why I felt this way or it was because it was simply a bad play with worse characters.
The characters in Act Two seemed to be heading in the same direction. This couple gave me nothing to care about. I felt as though I was a fly in the bedroom of two people that I wished would open the window and allow me to fly away. The incessant whining by the husband and dominance by the wife just made me remember the arguments of my parents when I was a child.

I understand this production was to be a parody of social and cultural norms. Also it was to be a small scale tale about large scale problems in our world. I just wished they would have tempered the whining and crying with smarter dialogue. When I came home my significant other asked me, “Well honey what was the fate of the cockroach?” I said back to her, “Does it really matter?” To quote comedian Dennis Miller, “This is only my opinion, I could be wrong.”

Now everytime I see a cockroach, I think of that crazy play! Arrrrggghhhh!