Play is true to abuse reality

Unhappily, Daryl H. Miller’s review of “Damages” by R.S. Call betrays his lack of discernment for the subtleties in the play [“Pain in ‘Damages’ Proves Unpalatable,” Oct. 29]. Of all the locally performed theatrical works devoted to clerical sex abuse (e.g., “A Comfortable Truth” or “The Prince of L.A.”), Call’s is by far closest to reproducing the experience that survivors themselves recall.

From the perpetrator’s seemingly innocuous grooming of his victims to the faux concern and subsequent stonewalling of the hierarchy, from playing “musical parishes” with alleged abusers to hardball legal tactics worthy of a consigliere for the Cosa Nostra, the playwright catalogs the “voices” of the parties with unerring precision.

Along the way, the inner thoughts of survivors and churchmen -- both victims of this abomination -- along with the facile self-delusions of the abusers, are laid bare in all their messy complexity.

This piece is no “topicality” or “melodrama,” “therapy” or “exploitation,” but simply, and often literally, truth that transcends the history it portrays and rises to the level of poetry.

But perhaps it takes the insight of a survivor like me to notice this.

Udo Strutynski

Los Angeles