THE STORY: At home on Christmas Eve, Rachel is informed by her guilty husband that he has hired a hitman to kill her, and she must flee for her life—which she does by scrambling out the kitchen window and into the snowy night. She meets and joins up with Lloyd Bophtelophti, a true “original” who has changed his name to avoid alimony payments and who now lives with a paraplegic named Pootie (who also pretends to be deaf in order to get double disability). Rachel then wins $100,000 on a TV game show and begins a series of picaresque escapades involving numerous psychiatrists and, eventually, an ill-fated reunion with her husband. In the end, Rachel becomes a therapist herself, treating her own child (who fails to recognize her) and is led more and more to ponder whether the modern world might not be a vast conspiracy designed to systematically undermine her own increasingly shaky sanity.
This richly inventive and often startling dark comedy marked the arrival of an exceptionally imaginative and resourceful young playwright. Filled with bizarre characters and events, the play reflects the fractured life-styles which have become the norm for so many in our tenuous times.
“With RECKLESS…Mr. Lucas has given us a bittersweet Christmas fable for our time.
It’s a Wonderful Life as it might be reimagined for a bruising contemporary America in which homelessness may be a pervasive spiritual condition rather than a sociological crisis…RECKLESS…has a simple emotional pull akin to that of a Crosby ballad born of the lonely World War II home front, it yanks us through every conceivable absurdist hoop, fracturing narrative, language and characterization on the way to its rending destination.” —The New York Times.
