The horrifying details of the crime of Union County South Carolina resident Susan Smith are given a pretentiously lyrical but also compelling resonance in Brutal Imagination. Smith was charged and convicted in 1994 of the death of her two young sons, Michael, age 3, and Alexander, age 14 months. Smith had strapped them securely in the back seat of her car that she then pushed into a lake. The incidents surrounding the case are shown through an abstracted fiction laced with factual reportage. That particularized fiction is called Mr. Zero, the black man Smith invented for the authorities when she needed a fast and credible alibi. And it is Mr. Zero who becomes the dominant catalyst for recounting the events through editorializing and poeticizing.
The work of poet Cornelius Eady, in collaboration with jazz composer Diedre Murray and director Diane Paulus, the play also serves less pointedly to consider Smith's state of frame of mind. This is dramatized from an emotionally cautious and intellectually distant perspective. Mr. Zero, however, is a vivid creation/character fitting Smith's description to the police of the black man in plaid shirt and knit cap that she claimed jumped into her Mazda with gun in hand and drove off with her and the boys as captives. The play is a series of monologues that have been culled, edited and transposed from a cycle of poems by Eady, enhanced with media coverage. Brutal Imagination is exceptionally well-acted (considering the limitations put on them by the play's structure and style) by Sally Murphy as Susan Smith and Joe Morton as Mr. Zero, the phantom black threat. Morton's character has an ironic twist and is allowed to engage us with a gallery of black stereotypes, giving us a brief, albeit redundant, history of racial prejudice. Except that we see Smith as a composite of the inherent fears and biases, and prejudices that presumably come with the territory, Murphy has a more difficult time inhabiting a character that resonates too clinically. Murphy's most stirring moment comes as she reads from the kiss-off letter sent to her by her married boyfriend.
Although the creators would like to make us quiver at the thought of how easy it was for Smith the con the investigators, the fact remains that it took only nine days for them to break the case and get a full confession from Smith. Brutal Imagination uses mood music effectively and the stage is provocatively set with an artistically conceived pyramid-like construction consisting of various parts and pieces of a car, a baby carriage etc. The set, like the text, is soon scattered about doesn't shed any more light on what we already knew before we came in.
