What Nick Garcia and The Empty Boat
Theatre Company have done with his new play, There's Chinese
Tunnels Under Boise, is create an archeological experience of the
soul. Or rather, the soul of an Eighties hesher grappling with life,
the loss of a girlfriend, and the wisdom burried in a video game. But
I can't tell you anything more about the plot. For like any
top-secret dig in the middle of the desert — yes, even the barrens
of Boise, Idaho — Garcia's esoteric finds can't be revealed to the
(unpaying) public until a deeper understanding of our memories and
motives is decoded from the middens. Or from the Iron Maiden posters
on the wall, the Schaefer beer cans littering the road. We may think
we know the ghosts of our past, but what do they know about us? What
do they have to show us about the false perceptions, the misplaced
nostalgia, we pad around the clay-brittle edges of our most cherished
memories?
Like Elliot's The Wasteland, Tunnels floods
the viewer's senses with cultural references only an initiate can
fully appreciate. Yet this dizzyingly funny story runs deeper than
it's cave paintings. Mixing comedy with tragedy, the play is a
redemption song set to 70's and 80's rock and roll. And
by the last scene we are left searching under the couch cushions for
lost insights, broken joysticks, ancient clues as to who we think we
are and why.
