Rats Mass

Synopsis

Candles flicker in the twilight, casting long shadows across a blood-red carpet runner that stretches like an accusatory tongue through a makeshift chapel.

Brother Rat kneels at the altar, his human body grotesquely fused with a rat’s head and tail. He whispers fevered prayers, his words a frantic litany of childhood memories and apocalyptic visions. Beside him, Sister Rat stands rigid, her swollen rat’s belly a silent testimony to unspeakable sins. Their eyes, wild with fear and longing, dart between the silent procession of religious figures at the chapel’s edge and the specter of Rosemary, their long-lost friend who appears in a pristine white Communion dress, worms writhing in her hair.

Adrienne Kennedy’s “A Rat’s Mass” is a nightmarish fever dream, where the boundaries between memory and madness dissolve like sugar in bitter wine. The play pulsates with the raw energy of childhood trauma, each scene a jagged shard of broken innocence. Religious iconography twists into symbols of persecution, as Brother and Sister Rat desperately seek atonement for a mysterious act on a playground slide. Their fractured dialogue – part prayer, part confession, part primal scream – echoes through a landscape where Nazi soldiers march through midwestern neighborhoods and dead babies rain from attic beams. Kennedy’s surreal, poetic language creates a visceral sense of alienation and dread, forcing the audience to confront the psychological violence inflicted on Black bodies and psyches in a white-dominated world. As the rats’ frantic pleas for salvation grow more urgent, the play builds to a shattering climax that blurs the lines between redemption and annihilation, leaving us haunted by the sound of gnawing teeth and distant gunfire.