Playwright: Mary Scruggs
At: Live Bait, 3914 N. Clark
Phone: 773/871-1212; $20, $15
Runs through: March 2
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
Mary Scruggs has a wild and wholly, stranger-than-fiction tale to tell. Think about it: How many married ladies with elementary school-aged kids and clinical depression do you know who ditched the confines of soccer practice, PTA meetings and day job for a cross-country road trip with a few hundred hard-core bikers? We're not talking Schwinns here, but motorcycles—Roaring hogs and all the incumbent machismo gear: leather chaps, wraparound goggles and more moronically sexist jokes than you can shake a heavily tattooed fist at.
In her one-woman show, Missing Man, Scruggs offers a Picaresque sketch of her adventures with Run For the Wall, an annual event that sees hundreds of motorcyclists riding en masse Los Angeles to the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington, D.C. The rolling tribute aims to honors veterans killed in action and raise awareness of the thousands of MIAs and POWs still unaccounted for. That Scruggs is not an especially competent biker either as a passenger or a driver makes the journey all the unusual.
Directed by Edward Thomas-Herrera, Scruggs is a warm, engaging storyteller. But Missing Man is more pleasant than galvanizing, and incongruously weightless for a story rooted in the casualties of war. And while Scruggs final epiphany is eminently worthwhile, it is not unlike the pat messages found on those inspirational workplace posters featuring photogenic sunsets or vast swaths of emerald ocean.
Moreover, one character—Scruggs' husband—begs for further examination. There is something remarkable about a spouse who simply shrugs 'You should do it. Sounds fun,' when his wife broaches the idea of leaving home for a two-week road trip with 300 or so bikers. Granted, Scruggs probably condensed the discussion for performance. Even so, a husband who instantly agrees to shoulder the care and maintenance of a first-grader while his wife bunks with guys named Iron Balls and Thunder Bull for two weeks? That's somebody worth illustrating with a few more strokes.
The bikers she describes are what you'd expect: toothpick-chomping, whiskey-drinking toughs on the outside, endearingly kind and sensitive once Scruggs gets to know them. Ironically, the most engaging portion of Missing Man comes when Scruggs detours into her 'regular' life and her heroic battle with mood disorders. In one rich, brave passage, she offers an evocative metaphor for depression as she describes the exhausting, numb-hearted effort of just putting one foot in front of the other only to realize she's wading in water, then mud and ultimately quicksand. As for Scruggs' eminently practical laundry list of potential suicide methods—it's is flat-out hilarious.
From Huckleberry Finn to Hunter S. Thompson, revelations of the road are part of American culture. Leave the habitual geography of your comfort zone as Scruggs did, and you've got the rootstock of an adventure. Scruggs' adventure leaves you wanting her to take you further.
