“Our par­ents do not fol­low a tra­di­tion­al per­spect­ive, grow­ing smal­ler on approach. Only later will their true scale be appar­ent.”

- Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

Once, so the legend goes, there were a race of beau­ti­ful fiery-eyed chil­dren who heard the clari­on-call of a new and bright­er age; and buoyed by the prosper­ity wrest by their fath­ers from the hands of evil and intol­er­ance, these chil­dren went out into the world, for­nic­at­ing in the mud and singing in the fields and dis­ap­pear­ing into the East to return with spicy-scen­ted sker­ricks of time­less truth. And then the world, wicked and cracked, whispered through the free-flow­ing hair and into the ears of these per­fect sprites; and they learned too many words, and their world became ruled by black math­em­at­ics, and they built towers of glass and stone into which to throw the gold and baubles that were now their unreas­on for liv­ing (if you could call it that). And as their proph­ets grew older and dumber, they shook their heads and told their own chil­dren, we have failed, and now you must live in the ruins and scaf­fold­ing of our aban­doned dream. And, long story short, that’s how we got Smells like Teen Spir­it.

Tigers of Wrath is a retell­ing of a gen­er­a­tion’s sus­tain­ing myth: the story of how Baby-Boomers are the worst. The story has been told before and will be told again; the names have been changed to pro­tect the guilty even as they sit in the audi­ence, beat­ing their chests and inton­ing mea cul­pas like a Hail Mary. Yes, if there’s one group who love to watch Boomers fail, it’s their kids; but if there’s anoth­er, it’s the Love Gen­er­a­tion them­selves, who just can­’t get enough of being told how glor­i­ous were those days of unshaven, chest-beat­ing earn­est­ness, and how dark the silence when it came time to stop the record.

Play­wright Dean Park­er con­fesses he nev­er went on a “China trip,” but appar­ently the phe­nomen­on was in the early ’70s a near-ubi­quity among New Zeal­and’s cloves-‘n’-sideburns set. Park­er­’s play begins at a rest-stop on one such trip, dur­ing which lives’ courses are set, love is won and lost, and Maoist fla­vour-text gets quoted a couple times. You can almost (mer­ci­fully, almost) smell the nag champa and dis­dain for West­ern stand­ards of hygiene. The show’s three-hand prin­cip­al cast evoke a rich wan­der­ing pathos, sketch­ing a New Zea­l­and a thou­sand miles away and a China whose insur­mount­able ali­en­ness can be pro­cessed only by revolu­tion­ary rote and token­ist admir­a­tion.

It’s an East/West dicho­tomy more con­cerned with the flor­id sheen of Mao’s Little Red Book than with pars­ing its con­tents, Park­er build­ing char­ac­ters whose polit­ics are driv­en primar­ily by their hearts and hor­mones. For the second act, wigs are shed and makeup darkened for a twenty-year flash-for­ward to the New Zea­l­and of the 1990s, and it’s this mas­ter­ful center­piece that’s the play’s strongest: all pithy politick­ing and estranged egos, a Fall whose cause will become teased out over the show’s remain­ing length. Ripped from the yel­low­ing head­lines of Even­ing Post front pages, Kate Pri­or’s Trish becomes hand­maid­en to the infam­ous Les­bi­an Con­spir­acy that ous­ted Mike Moore from his short-lived Prime Min­is­ter­ship. A knack for the endur­ing myth­o­logy of Bee­hive polit­ics will serve audi­ences well here, as Pri­or’s wide-eyed revolu­tion-tour­ist (she can­’t under­stand why a trav­el­ing Maoist can­’t vis­it the Great Wall) morphs into a guf­faw­ing, eye-rolling Thorndon insider. Pri­or’s per­form­ance is the play’s best, even through a nar­rat­ive that dis­ap­point­ingly cheats her char­ac­ter out of a seem­ingly-cru­cial third-act cath­arsis.

We’re left with less than ini­tially prom­ised: the inquiry that Park­er claims as his inspir­a­tion scarcely sus­tains its own act, let alone the home­bound con­front­a­tions that fol­low. A seem­ingly util­it­ari­an sub­plot drives anoth­er char­ac­ter­’s undo­ing, handled with far less curi­os­ity or sym­pathy than the adven­ture which began the show; the Clas­sic Hits of Middle New Zea­l­and are afforded a nar­rat­ive prom­in­ence they can­’t sus­tain, par­tic­u­larly after dec­ades’ worth of ser­vice as IRD hold-music.

But maybe this too is true for the Boomers – and if they’re singing yes­ter­day’s anthems at lonely-hearts karaoke nights like that of the play’s final scene, you can bet that one day, they’ll be singing Come as you Are.

The Tigers of Wrath by Dean Park­er, dir­ec­ted by Jane Wad­dell, on at Circa Two until 1 Dec