Theater review | Mercy Killers: Politics hurt potential of one-man production

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Michael Milligan as Joe
By For The Columbus Dispatch  • 

Mercy Killers is a well-intentioned and thoughtful play, but it tries so hard to make a political point that it neglects the fundamentals of drama.

Michael Milligan wrote and stars in the one-man, one-act production.

He plays Joe, the

middle-aged owner of an auto body shop from southeastern Ohio. Joe is in a police interrogation room. He explains how his life has brought him to what must be the most patient detective in Ohio.

A few years earlier, Joe’s wife, Jane, discovered that she had breast cancer. From that point onward, their lives went into a downward spiral, as medical bills forced them into foreclosure and divorce, and led inevitably to the tragic conclusion that has brought Joe to the police station.

Milligan deftly portrays Joe’s anger and frustration as he ricochets from sadness to confusion and tries unsuccessfully to reconcile his long-held right-wing beliefs with his personal experience.

Much of the time, he comes across as a good man caught in a bad situation that is out of his control.

But Joe’s character sometimes strains credibility. He blusters and raves repeatedly about his admiration for Rush Limbaugh, but he’s also sensitive enough to wax poetic about the “emerald-green moss and water clear as air” in West Virginia, and to stop his car to check on a squirrel he might have hit.

For all of Joe’s love for Jane, she comes to life mostly as a victim of cancer. We know she’s a hippie who likes strawberry-rhubarb pie and long walks in the woods, but, if she has a job or a life outside Joe and illness, we don’t hear about it.

Milligan walks a thin line between personal drama and polemic, and often the message overshadows the man.

While Milligan treats Joe with respect, he frequently uses him to hammer home the villainy of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, mortgage

brokers and the health-care industry. Joe’s tendency to fall victim to every societal ill of the past couple of decades overshadows any individuality he might have.

His story might not be dramatically complicated enough to carry a whole play, even such a short one.

He’s a victim, more acted upon than active, and his story, though touching, is so predictable and unsurprising that even the audience members most sympathetic to his plight might wish that it could be told more briefly.