The Last Carburetor by Leon Chase
The
American family, or what’s left of it anyway, comes under scrutiny in Leon
Chase’s play, The Last Carburetor. Following in the footsteps of Eugene
O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and—most emphatically—Sam Shepard, Chase has fashioned
here a taut drama of dysfunctionality centered around tension between a father
and his sons.
The patriarch here is Doug, very much a broken-down shadow of a man, not unlike the rotting 1970 Plymouth Hemi Barracuda that has awaited repair in his suburban Detroit garage for more than two decades. Doug’s elder son, Keith, left home for college and never looked back, becoming a success in the computer biz on the West Coast. Younger son Josh, who idolized dad and car, got neither affection nor respect, and went off to fight in Desert Storm (to the consternation of his Vietnam vet father) and then took a job as a bounty hunter.
Now it’s 2000. Mom has left, though Doug seems unable to say for sure whether she’s on vacation or gone for good. The youngest child, Ayla, is in college at Ann Arbor, looking eagerly forward to escape from her family. Josh and Doug maintain an uneasy truce. And then Keith turns up, unannounced, in a ditch near Doug’s house.
Thus begins, in earnest, Chase’s drama, in which all the stuff Doug thought he knew, and all the stuff Ayla and Josh though they understood, and all the stuff Keith thinks he’s going to rediscover—all these things blow up in everybody’s face, in a cathartic, life-changing weekend.
(Synopsis courtesy of Martin Denton, excerpted from Plays and Playwrights 2003.)
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