Ommmm A Collection of Plays and Monologues

Ommmm: A Collection of Plays and Monologues
Hugh Fox
World Audience Inc
ISBN: 978-1-934209-26-4
Literature, Drama, Theatre
Reviewed by Lee Gooden

The late great playwright, novelist and poet Samuel Beckett opened a giant door with his brilliantly nihilistic, but beautiful works, specifically the play Waiting for Godot. Playwrights like, Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, David Mamet and even the latest bad boy of the stage Neil LaBute, admit to be indebted to Beckett.
Hugh Fox is no exception. His new book, Ommmmmm: A Collection of Plays and Monologues owes much to Samuel Beckett. Consisting of 100 pages, Ommmm includes the 8 short plays, Ommmm, Swing Lo, First Corinthians, Path of Righteousness, Seig Whatever, Black and Blue, I’m a Kikey Jew, Witnesses, Spider, Spider and 25 interconnected monologues.
The play Ommmm begins with two guys, Sam and Bryant sitting at a table on stage drinking coffee. Sam informs Bryant that after an operation (bi-lateral orchiectomy for prostrate cancer, that Sam calls castration) he can suddenly profile women just by looking at them. Fox writes,
Sam: Maybe it’s the hormone changes, suddenly pre/post-pubic, I started looking at women on the streets, in stores, having lunch down at the Central Market, anywhere, and I discovered I could get a total, whole psychological profile just by looking at a woman’s face.
Bryant: What about Men?
Sam: Not interested, but women: I’ve suddenly become a mind-reader, visionary, mystic, on-the-run-psychologist.

The idea of profiling women has humorously been explored in the Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt movie, What Women Want, but that humorous hour and forty-five minute movie isn’t anyway near as funny or poignant as Ommmm.
In the first act of Fox’s play First Corinthians (a two act play) we are introduced to Bert, an older man dying of cancer. He enlists the aid of a younger man Sam (not the Sam from Ommm) to track down all the women in his life that loved him and he had left behind or abandoned. In the second act, these women confront him and he confronts his death.
The short play Witnesses is about an old man named Martin haunted by his reminiscences, regret and loss, similar to Beckett’s play, Krapp’s Last Tape. Mignon, Martin’s former wife appears.
Mignon: We’re all dead. A thousand years have passed. That’s the way Hell is. What did you expect it to be, cafes and parks? Its closed doors and dead windows, dead walls and time-time lapses.
And later, the character Son says,
Son: What I believe in is DEATH. Whatever we have we have like a sneeze, like drinking a glass of wine, and when we get older the years start going like watching a film, compatible, incompatible, rich, poor, all of a sudden the trees are trees and the cheerios are cheerios, coffee’s coffee and the evening new is the evening news. Your friends begin to die. Hint, hint, the message is there full-time.
The themes of age, death and disease and atrocity run throughout all of the plays and monologues. Fox makes us laugh at those things in life, those fearful unknowns that can strike us down. While making us think about feeling obsolete, and injecting a disparate sadness deep within the muscle of our hearts he coaxes chuckles and chortles. His explorations into the human condition are the synthesis of pain and laughter, and that is life.
Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932. He is listed in, Who’s Who, The Two Thousand Most Important Writers in the Last in the Last Millennium.