Joanna Murray-Smith's plays seem to rise and fall for me based on whether she's using a pre-existing character or not - in the plays tied into someone already known ("The Female of the Species", clearly inspired by Germaine Greer, "Switzerland" with Patricia Highsmith), there's a strong and solid presence which draws my interest. In the others, where she has to create people from scratch, I never quite find that they feel fully formed, so much as an abstract series of familiar tropes (I've read one of her more famous peices, "Honour", a few times, hoping this time it'll grab me, but it never really rises above the familiar for me). She's got a good line in dialogue, with a poetic bent ... but nothing in the plots really ever get to me.
And alas, for me, "American Song" suffers the same way. There's a good visual metaphor (as our monologuing character builds a dry-stone wall) and the thread as he examines his life to try to determine the moment when the flaws emerged and led to an initially un-named tragedy is an intriguing set-up. But the life feels, for me, like it's made up of things I've seen before, with no new insights or particular surprises. Joe Petruzzi does good work with what the script offers, but ... this all felt very distant from me. I'm not sure whether it's that everything turns on an examination of American gun culture (which isn't really where my life centers), or that it's a story from the point of view of a hetrosexual father (I'm neither). But I never really found myself sufficiently engaged by this - it felt too much like an exercise, a demonstration, rather than the emotional catharsis I was hoping for.
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