They drink, they swear, they get high, they play air guitar: but it all looks a little sad, and more than a little desperate, when the red-blooded, all-American dudes involved are middle-aged, with the beer guts and the emotional baggage to match. This new play by US writer Brett Neveu is a noisy riff on disillusion, ageing and the hollow promise of the American Dream. It’s a little over an hour long, and it’s fine as far at it goes. The trouble is, for all the flair of Jo McInnes’s well-acted production, for all its blood, booze and testosterone and all its noisy revving, it never really grinds its gears out of neutral.
Jason, Bill, Shane and Greg have been coming to Red Bud – an annual Michigan motocross rally – for 20 years. Women have come and gone, there’s been bloodshed and bad behaviour; it’s a tradition they’ve observed with ritual dedication. This time, festivities are off to a bad start. Greg has failed to bring his bike, the posse’s habitual cruising mayhem machine. His wife Jen is heavily pregnant and a conspicuous party-pooper; while Bill - who, despite his macho job as a firefighter, is generally regarded as the pussy of the group - puts everyone’s nose out of joint by turning up with Jana, a loose-limbed, highly sexed 19-year-old blonde. What has always been an annual orgy of excess and male bonding inevitably turns nasty, as decades of suppressed resentment, rivalry and bitter disappointment comes spilling forth in a foaming, acidic spew of Jack Daniel's, Budweiser and bile.
