For the last week or so, I’ve been reading Errol Morris’s new book, A Wilderness of Errors, which re-examines the Jeffrey Macdonald murder case from 1970. Sifting through the record, Morris advances the position that a cocktail of sloppy police work and prosecutorial sleight of hand have resulted in an innocent man spending three decades behind bars. It is a cautionary tale about the justice system. The “CSI” era is deceitful artifice; despite the fact that every week we are bombarded with television programming where every crime is solved swiftly, straightforwardly, and conclusively, Morris (whose previous filmwork included the superb documentary “Thin Blue Line,” which resulted in an innocent former-Death Row inmate being exonerated) is not so sure this is a storyline we can trust.
It turns out that this book was timely background for “Home Invasion: The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth,” a new one act play written by Anna Theresa Cascio and performed by Doc Dougherty. The story, based on events that have played out in Cascio and Dougherty’s lives over the past three years, plays out like some form of “method acting” in reverse: Doc (whose roles have included cops of “Law and Order,” a gangster in a daytime soap, and a fake FBI agent in an indy film) has a pair of Connecticut detectives show up on his New Jersey doorstep, accusing him of participating in a “home invasion.” A year or two before, Ann Bass, arts philanthropist and ex-wife of a wealthy Texas oil magnate, was held hostage in her home by masked gunmen, shot up by the invaders with hypodermic needles, told she would only be injected with the antidote if she paid an $8.5 million ransom. Doc, who bartends part-time for caterers in high ticket price charity events, has crossed paths on a couple of stray occasions with Ms. Bass. When an accordion case containing needles and empty cigar cases washes up near the Queens neighborhood where he grew up, Doc falls under suspicion. How? Well, there is a suggestion by the cops of “touch DNA,” the results of which may place someone from his family group on the scene. There is Doc’s history of brushes with the law as a teenager, his service as a medic decades ago in the military. But, there is also the mysterious fact that his brother has only just escaped punishment on a pair of serious offenses. He has seemed distant of late, and there is talk that he is offended by some perceived slight. Did a family grudge factor in?
Before long it becomes apparent that it is Doc and Theresa’s home that is being invaded. There are policemen loitering in cars outside their apartment building, unexplained clicks during phone calls that could be wire taps, cops showing up on the doorstep pressing Theresa and the neighbors to think the worst. It isn’t long before their domestic “fortress of solitude” feels like its secure, protecting walls have been breached. The receipts Theresa finds that could easily be an alibi are challenged by the agents as an elaborate ruse to cover up, and they threaten her with accessory. Doc’s feisty determination to not be steamrolled, the residue of a tough upbringing in Broad Channel, lead him to hard-headed and absolutist resistance that both increases the appearance of his guilt in the eyes of the investigators and the exasperation of a partner who wants desperately to believe the simple act of cooperation will make it all go away.
Doc commands the stage throughout the evening, bringing a wide range of characters (himself, his wife, his interrogators and lawyer, family members, neighbors and friends) to life. Deftly directed by Molly Fowler, the story is complicated and briskly paced, with only a few shifts of lighting and music samples to signal changes of time and location. It is a gift to be able to manage all of this— to use tiny bits of physicality and subtle vocal inflection to suggest the particularity of character in a way that keeps the audience oriented, while not resorting to caricature. Doc managed to bring these perverse events alive, inviting us to use our imaginations to occupy the confused and threatening space he came to inhabit through no fault of his own. By the time, near the end, he comes to ask angrily, entreatingly, to no one in particular how it is that years of hard work and determination to reshape himself— to alter his pathway from the man he might easily have become— count for so little against a police system that seems weighted to assume his guilt, we wonder with him: Is the woman holding scales outside so many courthouses masked out of a desire to mete out unbiased justice, or is she just sometimes blind?
“Home Invasion: The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth,” a one man show starring Doc Dougherty, written by Anna Theresa Cascio and directed by Molly Fowler, runs Thurs, Fri and Sat for the next two weeks at the Jorda Production Theater [Oct 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13] Tickets are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/258932.
