Inside the Spastic Club

By T.E.Kalem

CREEPS

by DAVID E. FREEMAN

The four principal characters in Creeps are victims of cerebral palsy, as is David E. Freeman, the playwright.

The dramatic setting is a men's room outfitted with the shabbiest imaginable toilet facilities, including two mottled urinals. The inmates, for that is how they view themselves, use this room to hide out from the larger premises of what they call "the spastic club."

Its official name is "the Workshop," and it is run by a rather smarmy doctor and a highly officious nurse. The atmosphere is somewhat reminiscent of the mental asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The men do the simplest kind of make-work. While their presence is voluntary, they are psychically crippled by a desperate need for safety and a deep fear of being objects of ridicule, scorn or pity in the outside world.

One man, who wants to be an artist, makes the big break for dignity and free dom. Another, who wants to write, can not summon up that last demanding ounce of courage. That is about all there is to the plot, and it is not really enough.

However, as a documentary slice of life about a condition and a place that physically unhandicapped people dread even to think about, the play is powerful, harrowing, grimly humorous and altogether absorbing. The cast, in its superbly graphic work, leaves nothing to be imagined or desired. One cannot guess from a work as distinctly person al as Creeps what David Freeman's precise future as a dramatist will be. But in this stubbornly resilient play, he holds up a mirror to the grievously wounded lot of some of our fellow humans and asks us to have the moral courage to face them as they are.

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