Particularly in the Heartland

Published on 11/08/2006 00:12

TRAVERSE (VENUE 15)

IT'S always been possible to trace themes and obsessions running through each year's Edinburgh Fringe, little signs of the zeitgeist recurring here and there. Never in the history of the event, though, can there have been a year so dominated by a single overwhelming subject: the global dogs of war that have been unleashed since the events of 2001, and the horror of liberal Americans - young, old and middle-aged - at the role of their government in these events.

In show after show, Americans who thought they were living in a rational enlightenment democracy articulate their shock at finding themselves in what suddenly feels more like some weird post-modern theocracy, obsessed with biblical ideas about Rapture and Armageddon. And nowhere is that sense of outrage and betrayal expressed with more explosive youthful energy, more sheer intelligence and sense of history, and a more radical theatrical vision, than in Particularly in the Heartland, presented at the Traverse by the young New York group TEAM, the Theatre of the Emerging American Moment.

Particularly in the Heartland - directed by TEAM's Rachel Chavkin, and devised with the six-strong performing company - is a vividly surreal post-apocalyptic fantasy set in Kansas, which is not only the geographical heart of the United States, but also the starting-point for that most archetypal of all American movies, The Wizard Of Oz. In the white-picket-fence home of the Springer family (another sharp cultural reference), the three children are worried; they believe that The Rapture has happened, and that their parents, late back from the Wal-Mart, have been taken up to heaven in a cloud of glory. In no time at all, their lawn is invaded by three strangers - a pregnant girl from another planet, the ghost of assassinated liberal hero Robert F Kennedy, and a stressed-out businesswoman called Dorothy, fallen from an airliner that exploded overhead; and from there on, things can only get crazier. Love and reason clash with bigotry, violence and religious hysteria, RFK and Dorothy mature - surprisingly sexily - into a pair of so-in-love all-American parents, and the kids grope towards their various personal salvations.

Particularly in the Heartland is more like a piece of theatrical beat poetry than a conventional narrative, and its use of iconic American imagery, from Dorothy's red shoes to White Christmas snowstorms, sometimes becomes fertile to the point of chaos. But from the opening, where they coax the audience into singing along with the mighty words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, to the final ironic flourish of the Stars and Stripes, TEAM are not afraid to invoke the values and ideas that make the liberal dream of America worth fighting for; and it's that willingness to express idealism and hope, as well as cynicism and despair, that gives their work its special richness, and its political edge.

• Particularly in the Heartland until 27 August. Today 9.30pm