Necessary Targets

continued

out of a questionable script. The outstanding performances are by Shirley Benyas, Terry Heck, and Wendy Katz Hiller.

Unfortunately, Necessary Targets (by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues) is really, the press release says, "the story of two American women who journey to Bosnia to help women refugees and emerge changed themselves." The refugees' stories are framed by the ongoing passive-aggressive bickering of a duo of naive American psychotherapists, sort of like Oscar Madison and Felix Unger without the humor. It's an arguable point whether they are "deeply changed themselves," but certainly they spend a lot of time taking their own emotional temperature. This could have been a mordant dark comedy about the uniquely American ability to take self-absorption to an evangelistic level. If a Sarajevan playwright had written it, it surely would have been that — for antebellum Sarajevo was the home of sophisticated, tough, unsentimental, and world-class theater.