At B.R. 2 Theatre
By Tony Zaza
Ears On A Beatle opens up many old wounds, both political and dramatic. For those who lived through the era, Mark St. Germain’s play serves as an often painful, sometimes poignant recollection of the consequences of political dissonance exemplified the case of John Lennon. For those who know little of the period, the drama exhibits the ideal of truth as a byproduct of ‘official histories’. The play examines the relationship between a seasoned and newly-recruited FBI agent. Their assignment is surveillance of John Lennon’s activities in support of the government’s desire to discredit him. Along the way they discover how truth evolves in their own lives, as well as in the political arena.
The work arrives at a time when a nation again faces government’s daunting attempts to control the flow of information by selectively releasing facts about foreign and domestic events to further political objectives and personal gain. For those who know how government agencies operate, the mechanics of creating different kinds of "truth" is a daily routine. The playwright refers to fact that the Chinese have five words for truth in a line delivered by one of the characters, an FBI agent, who is a conflicted version of most government functionaries. In keeping with the subtleties of the plot, varieties of truth are slowly revealed, but perhaps deserve further elaboration for younger audiences who seem to be politically unenlightened.
The sadness doesn’t stem for Lennon’s unfortunate end, it grows out of the realization that the radical activism that characterized the American Landscape from 1960 through 1973 at the end of the Vietnam War was impotent. Like the two agents in the play who build case histories before our eyes, historians edit fact to encode ideological imperatives.
The current structure of the play might serve its future audiences better if it included a bit more of the mechanics of altering reality.
