Don't fence me in
Denis Johnson and Campo Santo continue their dazzling run at Intersection for the Arts.

By Robert Avila

I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences / And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses / And I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences / Don't fence me in / No / Poppa, don't you fence me in.

"Don't Fence Me In," 1944

Floyd: Is this insanity?

Red: This isn't insanity.

Floyd: Well, what is it then?

Red: The United States of America.

A SMALL TOWN in rural northern Idaho is suffering from population attrition. A mother and her seven children have gone missing, as has a local farmer. Deputy Sarah Dubie (Catherine Castellanos) is having trouble locating the farmer's neighbor, Critter (John Diehl), and the mother's husband, Floyd (Cully Fredricksen). Meanwhile, Red (Alexis Lezin), the mentally deranged wife of the missing farmer, waits for her husband at home in bed. It's all very mysterious and somehow expected, part of the natural balance registered by playwright Denis Johnson, Malthus of America's jaded frontier.

Psychos Never Dream, his fourth world premiere with Campo Santo at Intersection for the Arts, continues Johnson's lurid and luminous excavation of the American gothic. The ground surveyed here is laid bare from the outset, you might say: a man puts the finishing touches on a fresh grave; another is chagrined at its placement in his backyard but is in no mood for moral judgments. As they sort through the situation, Floyd makes the case that he and Critter, the man with the shovel, are cousins after all ("twice removed"). But then the body in the sack is Critter's uncle.

Family reunions like this are an incestuous, cannibalistic affair, where disputes over water rights or boundary lines mingle with memories of playground slights and barnyard lechery, a genealogy of lust and murder. In Johnson's ravishing dialogue, the social chasm crackles with the wry, fearless humor of the prairie individualist. Diehl's marvelous Critter is that, to a T, a scraggly, wily egoist, and a mongrel as charming and ornery as his name implies. For Critter, murder is simply the assertion of his rights as an American. Fredricksen's Floyd, meanwhile, embodies an iconic, dark comic-book image of the frontiersman as Vietnam vet, his powerful frame topped by a cowboy hat screwed down so tightly it would take a crowbar to get it off. Crawling out of his own grave in one of no doubt many resurrections, Floyd heads back into the earth the first chance he gets.

The prospect of pay dirt has the normally shrewd Floyd helpless – "You know I'm after the Earth's treasure," he tells Red. But a frontier long since overrun by civilization and supersized corporate cowboys leaves the descendants of the pioneers picking pathetically over a graveyard. "No gold," Red mutters, "just the golden arches."

Lezin's completely captivating Red looks like Annie grown up into a Midwestern crack addict, her freckled face a mask of bewildered pain, and her voice pitched high on a tattered neighborly drawl that mingles hallucinatory visions, disarming need, and paranoiac cunning. Sarah, a wonderfully understated Castellanos, plays big sister more than authority figure to the helpless Red despite her badge. She's a sympathetic cohort from youthful commune days, before that Eden was literally poisoned by the mercury that's since burrowed in the febrile brains of Red and Critter. By contrast, Sarah has settled into an emotionally vacant but utterly sane, comfortable life in town.

The American psychopath may be just the suffocated modern offspring of yesterday's ruthless utopian, but with no Eden left to despoil, the play hitches the stalled dreams of outmoded romantics to a careening comedy of terrors. And four fearless performances under Darrell Larson's fine direction ensure the forward motion never slackens either but amounts to a giddy, freaked-out joyride, festering energies and swollen appetites riding shotgun to the nihilist at the wheel. If we're dropped off a bit abruptly at the end, it's in front of a breathtaking vista, a present that not only makes a travesty of the past but also prefigures the unraveling future.

'Psychos Never Dream' runs through Feb. 16. Thurs.-Sun. and Feb. 16, 8 p.m., Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, S.F. $9-$15. (415) 626-3311.