Brightest Young Things

In 1984, Kathy Boudin -- a member of the Weather Underground and daughter of a prominent left-wing lawyer -- was convicted of felony murder for her participation in an armed robbery that resulted in the killing of two police officers and a security guard.  It’s not a coincidence that in Theater J’s production of Something You Did, left-wing radical Alison Moulton (Deborah Hazlett), a member of a radical leftist group, is up for parole after serving 30 years behind bars for an anti-war bomb that killed a police officer.  Her leftist attorney, who also happens to be her father, just recently passed away and his law partner, Arthur Rossiter (Norman Aronovic), thinks he has a plan to finally get Alison out.  However, the parallel ends there.  "I couldn't begin to write about the Brinks armored-car robbery, “playwright Willy Holtzman told the Washington Post. "For me, that only can be seen one way. So I put that aside and invented the event of the play."

The rest of plot is fabulously fabricated, but not outside the bounds of reality.  Rossiter hopes that a reunion between Alison and her former comrade and lover turned arch-nemesis and famous right-wing rabble rouser Eugene Biddle (Rick Foucheux) might give her some neo-con cred in front of the jury. After all, Rossiter -- who bares a nauseating resemblance to a certain Fox News provocateur --  has a trail of paper documents from Eugene’s past that could ruin his career.  However, Eugene has his own agenda up his sleeve: if Alison accepts his help, she’s going to have to make public the identity of a certain famous Yale Law School grad with connections to the White House who spent a summer working on her case.   “I feel like I’m locked in hell with Dick Cheney,” says Alison five minutes into their confrontation.

Aronovic lights up the stage and balances the tasks of playing an incredibly shrewd lawyer and a gentle grandfatherly figure.  Lolita-Marie brings sass, grit, and courage to the role of a street smart prison guard at a high-security jail.  And Hazlett, whose character at one point concedes that she simply wants nothing more than the freedom to actually be human again, persuasively carries the heavy guilt of a woman who never meant to kill.

In his writing, Holtzman appears to take a non-partisan approach.  Alison and Eugene are both extremists in their own right, and, in the end, they both seem a little silly -- admitting themselves that they are simply “political animals trying to be human.”  For the most part, that’s a good thing.  But, at times, the plot gets lost in political banter.  The cheap shots and soap box speeches get tiring.  There’s also a blundering meeting between Alison and the slain officer’s daughter, Lenora Renshaw, which unfolds awkwardly and doesn’t quite succeed in delivering the strong emotional impact one would expect from such an encounter.

Ultimately, the idea of a young, liberal Glenn Beck sleeping with a convicted left-wing domestic terrorist, throwing her under the bus during her indictment hearing s, and then trying to use her connection to a famous politician to promote anti-White House conspiracy theories 30 years later may be a little far-fetched, but it’s certainly amusing.  Even more so, it makes for juicy political drama.