“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