Buffalo News Review by Jim Santella 7/1/2003

Rating: Three and 1/2 Stars. Drama by local playwright Kurt Schneiderman. 

     As you enter the New Phoenix Theatre, it takes a few minutes for your eyes to adjust to the darkness. Finding your seat is an exercise in dramatic choices. The audience is embedded in the set of "Manifest Destiny Blues," an original, well-crafted play written and directed by Kurt Schneiderman. 
     Clusters of chairs surround a podium on a union labor hall stage. On the other side of the set, two tiers of seating snuggle up to a bedroom vanity where a bed is already occupied with a sleeping male. The remaining seats are within arm's length of a working-class kitchen. It is Jan. 25, 1991, in the Katakis home, as we get ready to share a Buffalo family's journey of social discovery and political insight. 
     "Manifest Destiny Blues" is the modern stepchild of the theater of ideas that extends back to Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov and Berthold Brecht. It is a conflict between idea and action - conception and execution. 
     The message becomes clear as we time travel from 1991 (the Gulf War era) back through time to Sept. 5, 1901 (the Pan-American Exposition and President William McKinley's assassination). Each scene takes the play's five characters a step further back into the past to demonstrate history repeating itself in a disastrous series of historical labor and war scenarios and choices. 
     Alethea Katakis (a passionate Leah Russo) is an idealist, an activist looking for the truth in a family and world that seems bent on not rocking the boat. As each scene leaps to a political hot spot in American history, Alethea is faced with the same dilemma, political involvement or status quo. 
     Her sister, the vain Zoe (Adair Luhr), is ready to marry her boyfriend, the jobless Liam (Seth Archer Eljer) and settle down to a family, home and children. Her uptight attitude is wonderfully reflected in her wardrobe of tightly bound underclothes that represent not only her femininity but her repression as well. 
     Their father (Phil Knoerzer) is a stereotypical Buffalo male. He lives and dies by his sports team, belongs to the union but doesn't actively support it and believes that his city is ready to rise from its economic ashes. 
     Liam's friend Peter Dempsey (Joshua Canfield), after an initial flirtation with Alethea and liberal politics, chooses the wealth and comfort of the middle class. 
     Finally, it is Liam who, in Aristotelian terms, is the character who changes. After a stint in the military in various time periods, he understands Alethea's passion for change and joins her cause both politically and personally. 
     Like Brecht and his theater of revolt, "Manifest Destiny Blues" is a play of ideas and not character. It is a play with a thought-provoking message that questions whether we, as individuals or a society, are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. More directly, it questions the United States' involvement in foreign wars and domestic labor problems. 
     But it's the ghost of Buffalo's past that hangs most poignantly over "Manifest Destiny Blues." The didactic play gives us a postmodern peek at the disappointment and failed opportunities that are part of the Queen City's social and economic legacy. 
     In a larger context, it's an exploration of America's perceived imperialist philosophy as expressed by newspaper editor John L. Sullivan, who gave voice to Theodore Roosevelt's expansionist ideas. As part of his annual address to Congress in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt stated that in keeping with the Monroe Doctrine, the United States was justified in exercising "international police power" to put an end to chronic unrest or wrongdoing in the Western Hemisphere. 
     This so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine contained a great irony. The Monroe Doctrine sought to prevent European intervention in the Western Hemisphere; the Roosevelt Corollary justified American intervention asserting the "right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent." 
     It is that manifest destiny that Schneiderman is invoking as part of what he calls President George W. Bush's new era of war on terror. 
     In the word's of the playwright: "From mustard gas to Agent Orange, from corset strings to bra burnings, from union drives to drive-through windows, . . . this play follows the experiences of one defiant young woman who struggles to maintain her ideals." 
     The cast is perfect and handles Schneiderman's script and Franklin La Voie's set with aplomb. Political plays frequently can be tedious. This one scintillates. Regardless of your politics, "Manifest Destiny Blues" is a play that speaks to our times. It is a fuse to thought.