Mohamed El-Assyouti attends Freakshow, a Howard Theatre production featuring four actors and 20 monologues Everything is a show, make-believe, for sale. Beer, religion, fat-loss, sex, insurance, even happiness is a persuasively marketed product. The Armenian-American Eric Bogosian -- playwright, novelist, actor -- has forged a reputation as the enfant terrible of show business. He first rose to fame when he authored Oliver Stone's Talk Radio (1988), based on his own eponymous play, produced by Edward Pressman, in which he also played the lead, Barry Champlain. His screen actor credits include Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry (1997) and Atom Egoyan's Arrart (2002), and he has performed solo on stage in such shows as Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead and Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll and SubUrbia ; the latter two were turned into films -- directed, respectively, by John McNaughton (1991) and Richard Linklater (1996). Bogosian finds inspiration in a range of sources from Fydor Dostoevsky to Jack Kerouac and punk rock, but he invariably focuses on the anxieties of lower- to middle-class America -- modes of creativity that seemed to suit the mood and style of the four promising actors who performed 20 of his monologues at the American University in Cairo's Howard Theatre. In Shit Fuck Piss, Ramsi Lehner dramatises the neurosis of a city dweller whose obsession with dirt finds expression in every human encounter he undergoes. Dirt has laid siege to humanity and there is no escape. Obsession is also the theme of the pieces Fat Fighter and The Law, performed by Ramsi and Ratko Ivekovic, respectively, in which the concepts fat and sin replace dirt as the cause for anger. In these cases, however, the characters -- a product promotion agent and a priest -- are rather comfortable with themselves, they only see the malignancies of others: the fat fighter is fat-free, the preacher sin- free. And their insistence on the abundance of these malignancies is intended to play on the fears, insecurities and gullibility of the audience. The preacher sells an ideology: all the sins that incurred God's wrath on Sodom and Gomorrah are happening here now; hence, you might either repent or, in case of violent tendencies, be a soldier of God. In Fat Fighter the eponymous product counters the accumulation of fat while the subject continues to indulge in butter, ice-cream, even lard. In Starving Children Ratko plays another priest, Reverend Tim, to whom the world divides into haves and have-nots; only the haves who give charity, however, are accepted in heaven. The neediness of the poor provides justification for Reverend Tim to collect money, the premise being that it is not only through official religious charity organisations that the poor can be helped. In No Problem, Ramsi plays a happily married middle-class American whose life is almost too good. He goes out with his wife and his "happy" friends. Though the character keeps expressing how happy he is, he comes across -- both in Bogosian's monologue and Ramsi's performance -- as an insecure, unsure character cheated of his American dream. In Insurance Sherif Nakhla plays an insurance salesman who keeps inventing disaster scenarios -- how will the children pay their school fees if, suddenly, the husband dies and the wife is beset by infirmity -- until the invisible client at the other end of the line agrees to make an appointment to meet him. Despite moments of reluctance and uncertainty, once he begins the phone conversation, the salesman manages to stretch his and his interlocutor's imagination beyond belief. Yet it is only later, in Fantasy and Journal, that Nakhla manages to convey an immediate intimacy of emotion. In the former he conjures up an erotic phantasm called Gina, to whom he keeps making love until another -- imaginary -- character appears. Though a clearly masturbatory scene, Nakhla plays it standing straight, gazing into space, letting the power of what Bogosian calls "the jazz of language" overtake the moment; the actor's repetition of certain words, and the way he accentuates or mumbles others, act to bring the text to life. Nakhla's intimacy with the diary he reads in Journal explores another kind of self-delusion: a young man recalls how, when he was alone and naked in his flat, a stranger appeared at his door. He takes the time to make advances to her, but when the moment comes for them to have the first kiss, she explains to him that their relationship is too special to be soiled by something as common and banal as sex. He seems to sincerely agree with her -- and resolves to split with his girlfriend Linda and drop out of school to go to Portland, Oregon. Luke Lehner's performance pieces evoke moments of introspection, sometimes streaked with self-delusion. These characters seem to be the most absolutist, insisting on all or nothing, and their delusions range from drunken hallucination, through guilt and self-worth problems, to grandeur. In American Dreamer a drunkard lies back in the middle of the road to enumerate the features of his imaginary wealth, recalling the beggar boy's father in Akira Kurosawa's Dodeska'den (1970). Drunkenness is a solution to all the pressing needs and desires of life. Later on, in Confession, another character confesses his sins -- getting drunk, swearing and taking the Lord's name in vain, as well as fantasising about attacking colleagues at work -- which seem to outweigh his very existence. But the crownpiece of the show was the closing piece, Shining Star, in which we listen to the unrepentant monologue of the killer of "those little girls" as he sits on the electric chair, right before he rides the lightning. His certainty of his power, tied though his hands may be, and the weakness of the authorities now eliminating him, recalls Albert Camus's Mersault in L'étranger. He is following a shining star in the desert; he has the power to act in a world of banality and subservience. And unlike the dreamer, for whom money constitutes power, or the confessor and the soldier, for whom power is identical to God or the US Army, the murderer's belief is that power is his own invincibility; not even death will destroy it.
