UNMAKING THE WORLD.(Theater Review)

Pain unmakes the world. A simple toothache is enough to wreck your thinking. Pain somehow renders you inarticulate; in fact, it makes words impossible. Now let's talk about terror. As Hilaire Belloc said, terror causes a sudden "paralysis of the soul": the mind is destabilized; it resists complexity, becomes prone to misjudgments. A passion for life is replaced by a passion for ignorance. This is the chilly, demoralized internal climate that the Siberian brothers Oleg and Vladimir Presnyakov try to capture in their smart, saturnine meditation "Terrorism" (crisply directed by Will Frears, at the Clurman/Theatre Row). The play, which was written a year before September 11, ...