Letters from a Small House – The Warrior play

Unabomber Ted Kaczinski + brother = breakdown of the system

 

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A warrior kills because he is convinced that his cause is more important than his enemy’s life, and Ted’s cause--disclosed in his published manifesto--is a revolt against industrialization and the servitude that technology induces. If each letter is a bomb that targets a symbolic individual, each bomb is also a letter, an act of communication.

The technology of mass communication is paradoxically vital to Ted’s war against technology. Murder is required for the reinstatement of innocence. The mathematician exalts “wild nature, independent of human management.”

But Ted, besides being a self-styled freedom fighter using bombs to “send a message” to the enemy, is also David’s brother-- not only a myth but a man whom some people remember, and someone even loves.

It was David who revealed his brother’s identity to the police, and it is David who gives an interview to the press in this play. Does a brother who tells his brother’s story thereby become a stranger? Does a stranger who tells a stranger’s story thereby become his brother?

Letters from a Small House places in equal relief Ted’s rationales and his recollections, the atrocities he perpetrated and those he deplored, the narratives he constructed, and his fate as a narrative subject.

synopsis by Edith Reisner Newton

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