Shoppers

<p>Perfection is not the basis of what I'm talking about says a member of the Cassandra family which forms the center of Denis Johnson's plays <em>Hellhound on My Trail and Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames</em>. The character could be speaking for his creator because human imperfection is one of Denis Johnson's specialties -- in his critically acclaimed novels short stories and nonfiction and now in two brilliant new plays.</p><p>These two works present a dramatized field guide to some of the more dysfunctional and dysphoric inhabitants of the American West: a sexual-misconduct investigator who misconducts herself sexually; a renegade Jehovah's Witness who supports his splinter Jehovean group by dealing drugs; the Cassandra Brothers and their father and their grandmother thrown together at a family reunion/wedding/melee at their shabby homestead in Ukiah California.</p><p>When <em>Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames </em>was performed in San Francisco in 2001 the <em>Chronicle </em>said There's an enormous appeal in Johnson's bleak-comic vision of a semi-mythic American West. That appeal derives from the author's perfect vision of imperfection embodied with such energy and courage in these marvelous pieces of theatre.</p>