Into the Breach, Out of the Chaos: ‘Beast’ and ‘Anger/Nation’

The wooden boxes that litter the set of “Beast,” Michael Weller’s muddled picaresque, are both instantly familiar and jarringly unusual. Long and wide enough to comfortably house bulked-up young men and women, they are draped in the stars and stripes of the American flag, with unobtrusive handles that make it easier to hoist them on and off airplanes and into the ground. They are military coffins, the seemingly inevitable reminders of the war dead. Current American policy has relegated them so…