A Review of The Silence of Malachi Ritscher by Kevin Kilroy

It’s been a while since I've written. Sorry to be so long out of the loop but I’ve been up to some exciting journeys. A few weeks ago I took a flight out to Chicago to see playwright Kevin Kilroy's new play The Silence of Malachi Ritscher and was blown away by Kilroy's ability to evoked emotion and guide the audience into the shoes of a political activist slowly going crazy.

I was told the story of Malachi Ritscher once by Kevin when he came to visit me in New York a few months ago, but by the time I made it to the play I had forgotten most of the story except the fact that Malachi had set himself on fire last November on the side of a highway in Chicago as a protest to the war in Iraq and surprisingly, it never made the news. The story Kevin chose to take on was already so loaded. A story like Malachi's says so much just by Malachi's actions alone – so how do you make such an intense story into an hour and a half play and most immortally how do you tackle an ending everyone knows is coming?

Kilroy’s play did something only a fine tuned hyper sensitive play write can achieve. He pulled the audience into the characters and made them walk around in someone else shoes. Kevin also used his mastery of the art of language and syntactic techniques to show the physiological brake of a man so bogged down by the guilt of daily life and the hundreds of tinny hands – underpaid and overworked – who wrapped the Hershey Kisses his wife put in the candy dish on valentine’s day. There wasn’t a moment I wasn’t engaged in how the story was forming, what the characters emotional connection was, the outstanding acting or the multi leaved language that played with my mind in such a pleasing way.

This project was a huge undertaking for Kevin – recreating the life of a man he didn’t know, whose life and death one could only read about in underground newspapers or blogs – but when the play ended and the saxophonist screeched from corner stage like a screaming man and the lights flickered and cut out – I wasn’t ready to give up my seat in the tinny theater and detach my connection from characters I had invested in for 90 minutes.

In my opinion, Kilroy's major achievement with The Silence of Malachi Ritscher was his ability to use experimental language and techniques to recreate the life a man he never new. I was strongly reminded of Michael Ondaatje's "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid".