potent stuff that never soft soaps the issues and leaves you stunned

Don’t miss Stalking the Bogeyman a dynamic play of sobering substance at New World Stages. The subject is the harrowing, life-altering effects of shame and self-doubt on a man who was brutally raped at the age of 7 and his 25-year obsession with searching for and confronting his abuser. Roderick Hill, an excellent actor with unexpected power hiding behind an appealing air of sensitivity, captures attention with his first line: “This time last year I started plotting to kill a man … I had a gun, and a silencer, and a plan.” Based on the true experiences of writer David Holthouse, shaped into a play and directed by Markus Potter, it has the nutritional value of mother’s milk and the bitter aftertaste of absinthe. In 1978, as a kid in Anchorage, Alaska, David admired the neighbor’s son, a husky 17-year-old quarterback, surrogate big brother and occasional babysitter, who taught him to drink scotch, do pushups and try other manly stuff. One night while their parents were playing cribbage upstairs, the older boy lured the naïve kid down to the basement where he cruelly sodomized him, leaving the second grader baffled, bleeding and traumatized. He no longer believed in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny, but David was convinced his attacker was the real, honest-to-goodness Bogeyman.