Theater Reviews

Flipping through the playbill and seeing that the subject matter dealt with refugees, my only hope was that Objects in the Mirror not be cheesy.  Immediately my heart lightened when I saw Allen Gilmore was in the cast.  I remember him most notably from his work with Congo Square and I miss seeing him as well as many other members of that outstanding ensemble as frequently as I once did.

 

Strikingly reminiscent of Dave Eggers arresting account of the “lost” boys from Sudan in his book, What is the What, Objects in the Mirror follows a loose band of Liberians in flight.  Forced to flee their country if they were to escape slaughter or, in the case of 15-year-old Shedrick Yarkpai’s (Daniel Kyri); kidnapping and conscription into a murderous guerrilla army.   An army where children’s emotions are desensitized with drugs before they’re taught to maim and kill with the cold efficiency of psychopaths.

 

Writing, directorial and acting excellence shoot to platinum level from the jump.   As ugly as this story of escape and renewal often is, playwright Charles Smith makes it brim to overflowing with love, honor, courage and, most emphatically, humor.  As trite as “we survive together or perish together” can sound, here you feel the gravity of those words because they are spoken as an emphatic imperative.  You’re not only shown what it means, you feel it.

 

None of this could succeed without a cast able to shoulder the weight of a story demanding so much intellectual grit.  This is what makes Objects in the Mirror so exceptional.  I can think of no other play, with the possible exception of August Wilson’s work, that so beautifully portrays intellectual heft in the form of a black man.  Usually it is the black woman who’s depicted with sinews of steel and phenomenal resilience.  Here it is the splendid Mr. Gilmore in the role of Shedrick’s Uncle John who acts as a modern-day Moses.  Equal parts shrewd tactician, adept negotiator and brilliant survivalist; he disguises his compassion in blunt speech and explicit demands.  It’s how the strong rise to survive wanton savagery.

 

Those same traits proved just as indispensable when the group was eventually accepted into Australia.  Their first asylum country, the United States, was closed to Liberians following 9/11.  A country with its own sordid history when it comes to race, redemption for these particular refugees came with a price in Adelaide, Australia’s coastal jewel.   Store managers followed them in grocery stores.  Bus drivers snarled racist epithets. But they had access to clean running water and were eating burgers with secret sauce rather than grass.  It’s not the first-time relative freedom came laced with daily indignities.

 

“You know those people had to step on somebody to get here” declared an observer of human events recently.  “Every refugee who makes it to a safe harbor country knows what it is to have blood on their hands”, he continued.  Perhaps.  Being a refugee is synonymous with desperation; often at its most rank.  A lot of unpretty things can happen to achieve the goal of escape.  You might even have to say you’re somebody you’re not.

 

For a 15-year-old, saying you’re someone else can weigh like an anchor and wreak havoc on your knowledge of self.  Naively confiding in a man whose interests in helping him right a wrong may be considered suspect; Shedrick threatens the safety of all of those who made it out of the Hell of Monrovia with him.

 

It’s once again Uncle John who rises to the occasion and confronts Shedrick on the danger of the confession.   He also has the temerity to defy the assumptive superiority of Shedrick’s confidante and challenges his impertinence and possible hypocrisy in persuading a vulnerable teenager to trust him.   There are those who live to experience the scene between Gilmore’s John Workolo and Rob Mosher (Ryan Kitley); the barrister in whom Shedrick placed his trust.  One black. One white. One an influential cog in the government wheel.  The other a displaced refugee.  But when it came to precision thinking and resolve, the battle was won by the one who isn’t supposed to win.

 

In the end, your imagination will determine the outcome.  Or you may leave always wondering what Shedrick decided to do.  Trust the infallible accuracy of his Uncle’s wisdom or place his fate in the hands of a stranger he hardly knows in the hope of restoring his true identity; his name.   What the audience is left to appreciate is the remarkable journey this story offers.  If insights are gained by placing oneself in another’s shoes, Objects in the Mirror holds treasure troves of revelations.

 

Endowed with the natural acting chops of a savant, Young Daniel Kyri as Shedrick Kennedy Yarpai drew you into his world and held you like a vise.  Lily Mojekwu as Luopu Workolo, John’s sister and Shedrick’s mother, was breathtaking in her role as a woman who will sacrifice having her son in her presence in order that he survive.  And Allen Gilmore out did himself in a role that allowed him to shine like gold.  “All good”.

 

 

Goodman Theater

 

April 29 – June 4

Lots of people, when they see a soap opera coming down the road, high tail in the other direction.  It may be a personal problem.  And an unfortunate one because they might miss the decadently delicious Destiny of Desire playing at the Goodman.

 

Telenovelas and soap operas come from the same place and in effect are the same thing.  Elaborate stories filled with unexpected twists, salacious secrets, ample doses of intrigue and even an occasional murder or two.  And don’t forget the sex.  Over a billion people around the world look at the Spanish version of these decorative deceits every day.

One thing that they are not is funny.  And that’s what makes Destiny of Desire so special and so wonderful.  Billed as a play within a play, it functioned more as a wonderful farce.  The trappings were all there for a traditional intricately tailored plot.  The baby switching at birth, the simultaneously running rich man poor man dramas, the secret love affairs and role reversals.  It’s all here and then some.  But let’s say with Destiny of Desire, it’s all wearing summer clothes.  Even though you can’t wait to find out what’s going to happen to poor Hortensia (Elisa Bocanegra) and hope like hell the conniving Fabiola (Ruth Livier) lands squarely on her own petard by the end, the play’s construction is so light that you’re laughing much more than you’re worrying.

 

Filled with music and crammed with sensational acting, the production exists as a spectacle of quality that leaves the audience to simply sit and marvel.

 

Top to bottom, the actors all deserve high praise for their splendid performances.  You might want to single out Ruth Livier’s singular take on Fabiola Castillo, the money hungry status obsessed trophy wife of a wealthy casino owner.  Equal parts superficial airhead and ruthless cobra, the combination makes her character hilarious as she flounces around the stage in couture hoochie.  The shtick greatly dilutes her venom while pumping up the comic appeal.

 

Eduardo Enrikez as the banished heir to his father’s casino fortune stole the show. He pulled off the tasty heart throb easily and balanced the comedic and the dramatic with astonishing skill.  But it was his singing prowess that took him over the top.  In one solo, the audience nearly went rock stadium wild after he slid from impeccable tenor to reach, hold and sustain a gorgeous high note.

 

To match the richness of the plot and the dazzle of the performances, the quality of the set design got stepped up a notch; even by the Goodman’s standards.  Never was sumptuousness more subtly implied with such dramatic effect.

 

 

Destiny of Desire

Goodman Theater

Mar 11 – Apr 16

Booty Candy, the play, is probably exactly what you think it is; a sexually infused theatrical force.   Booty Candy, the object, will likely not be what you expect.  But we’re here to talk about the play.

 

Anybody who loves having their expectations exceeded well beyond the imagination’s boundaries will delight in this production as much me.  Driving home afterward felt like leaving a killer party.

 

Most of the characters are the least likely folks you’d ever expect to see represented on the stage.  None of them had names because they all played lots of different roles in the play.  If they had names, you really wouldn’t be able to keep up.  They’re just actor #1, actor #2 through Actor #5.

 

It’s also pretty easy to lose track of how many scenes or sketches are whooshing by.  (There are eleven.) One scene can flow into another; with a whole new dramatic thrust, when one actor leaves and the other stays to take the play in a whole new direction.  You don’t realize until midway through the production that many of the scenes keep linking back to the to the very first one.

 

In it, a little boy is getting dressed to go to the store with his mother and asks her some rather sensitive questions about the anatomy.  Being a no-nonsense mom, she shuts down the question and proceeds to remind him that he better behave at the store or else.  Actor Two, Travis Turner, who proves so pivotal to the play, shape shifts with the best of them as he flows from little kid to stalked adolescent to a phenomenally cool gay guy who thrives on risk.  If everyone else in the cast weren’t so talented themselves, it would be hard to keep your eyes off of him alone.

 

Booty Candy’s very gay, very black, ridiculously smart and crazy funny despite the myriad hard truths and blistering insights flying through the dialogue.  To keep it simple and manageable, we’ll stick to the highlights.  The first big one being the scene where the preacher comes out to his church during the Sunday morning service.  Osiris Khepera, Actor Four, has the bearing and tonal gravitas of a true Baptist preacher.   While chastising his congregation for promulgating rumors that some boys in the choir are gay, he speaks over the congregation and directs his advice to the boys themselves.  Essentially demanding they be who they are and happy being whatever that is. He then defiantly steps away from the pulpit to reveal he’s wearing a pair of highly resplendent stilettos saturated in sequins. Preaching like the Holy Ghost would just not let him go, he returns to the pulpit to retrieve a flowing wig which he places majestically on his head.  It’s only a matter of seconds before the robe gets jettisoned to disclose a tasteful cocktail piece underneath.  The theater audience roared their approval.  Like many spiritual axis, the black church’s leadership enjoys a well-deserved reputation for its often virulent denunciation of homosexuality.  Concurrence among parishioners is so absolute that the topic is rarely even dignified with discussion.   To see O’Hara take it on this taboo with such aplomb was like being zapped by hot righteous lightning.

 

There were many other notable sketches/scenes.  The telephone conversation between two women dishing on the outrageous name one of their daughter’s is about to name its yet unborn child.  The bus stop scene where a guy exacts a minor miracle by using empathy to get inside his mugger’s head.  The astonishing confession of an effeminate boy at the kitchen table disclosing to his mother and step father that a man is trying to follow him home from school.  Rather than be defended, he’s admonished and instructed to butch it up. No more show choir!   The burgeoning affair between a young man and his brother-in-law.  And the final scene where it all comes full circle in a surprising suspense laden climax.

 

As black as the play is, there was one exception who proved more than a little startling.  Usually relegated to the role of simple foil when the cast is all minority, the sole white actor, Rob Fenton as Actor Five, functioned as a structural foundation for the play.  In the sketch where a moderator was hosting a panel of black playwrights, it was essential that his character be white. As was true in one of the final sketches.  In most of the scenes in which he appeared; at the bus stop, as the conflicted brother-in-law; even as the presider over the non-commitment ceremony which had to be seen and heard to be believed, his race was immaterial.

Like the other members of the cast, Fenton’s a fierce talent.  One can only look forward with anxious anticipation to seeing them all again new productions.

 

Taking his cue from a play that was considered seminal to the evolution of black theater when it opened in 1986, O’Hara openly modeled Booty Candy on the Colored Museum.  Like the Colored Museum, he uses a number of fast moving sketches to capture the essence of a number of black lives and thus, black life itself.  O’Hara’s black lives are primarily gay and that difference allows him to take us through many unexpected and exciting burrows of discovery.

 

If it’s true the play’s also autobiographical, O’Hara pulled a Mark Twain by teasing mountains of joy from rivers of pathos. Bravo.

 

Windy City Playhouse

1/25/17 – 4/15/17

Sometimes you wonder how an idea flowers into a premiere.  Victory Gardens production of Queen left a number of us in the audience pondering that question.  The play’s concept couldn’t be more noble.  Highlighting the global disappearance of bees, it followed the journey of two scientists whose groundbreaking work explaining that disappearance become suspect.  If they ignore the contradictory data to fit the model they’ve spent years cultivating, they’ll be rock stars.  Published, respected, and vindicated.

 

Parts of the play are highly technical which adds credence to the playwrights research and her commitment to scientific specificity and integrity.  Priya Monhanty as the quantitative wiz Sanam Shah nailed the cloistered nerd rabidly committed to her data and its integrity.  Darci Nalepa as Ariel Spiegel, the field expert who sacrificed the companionship of her baby’s daddy to prove a Monsanto pesticide was causing the decimation of a critical species delivered a solid performance as well.  A relief was needed from all of this gravity and it arrived in the form of Arvid Patel’ played by Adam Ross.  A quasi arranged love interest to Mohanty’s character, Sanam, he was cool, glib and often riotously funny as he did his woo thing.  A crazy mash up of Super Fly and a baby Warren Buffett made him wonderfully ingratiating.

 

If only the whole play could have maintained a bit more of that vitality. Queen was thought provoking.  The ultimate hope was that we would gain more insight into substantive causes for the alarming plunge in the bee population or glean a whiff of hope about their recovery.  Neither really manifested.  Instead the side stories prevailed.  One centered on the fallacy of scientific ethical integrity while the other dissected the decomposition of a friendship over those same ethical issues.  It worked well enough.  You left with a better understanding of the sacrifices people who dedicate their lives to research make to find answers to extraordinarily difficult questions.   That in itself could be reason enough to reserve a seat and watch this cautionary tale unfurl.

 

 

Victory Garden

Apr 14 – May 14

$20 – 60

 

Black men have been paying homage to black women artistically for years and in more ways than the obvious.  Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter, published in 1930, recounts a young boy’s subtle, deep; and in the end, memorable love for the women in his life; his mother, aunt and especially his grandmother.   “A Wonder in My Soul” attains similar heights of respect and reverence.

Play’s that make words dance and give them heat have impact because you remember how they singe you.  This Victory Gardens production ran like a constant current of energy through your veins for a couple of hours leaving you inexplicably exhilarated.

 

Co-owned by two lifelong middle aged friends, Bell Grand Lake (Jacqueline Williams) and Aberdeen Calumet (Greta Oglesby), the four walls of a fading beauty parlor on Chicago’s Southside make up the world and the universe of A Wonder in My Soul. The women are coming to terms with new realities both inside and outside their world of hair.    On one hand, business has slowed to agonizing levels and on the other; the country is finds itself on an unprecedented threshold.  It’s conceivable that a black man will be elected to its highest office on the globe.  Neither woman is having the life she dreamed of.  Rather than completing her nursing studies, Bell married badly and bore two children she would have to support alone.  Aberdeen, who goes by Birdie, relinquished her pursuit of a of a professional singing career. For her, life’s uncompromising dictates and loyalty to her friend imposed a hurtful reroute.

 

For decades, the collaboration worked beautifully.  Famous clients, thriving customer base, security.  Neighborhood change and time eroded all of that.  Despite the looming crisis, they jointly agreed to make a large loan to Bell’s social activist son, Lafayette, whose fiscal expertise lacked the vigor of his convictions to community.  A Wonder to My Soul asks what happens when two friends open a business together and the business not only suffers precipitous declines; but also sustains a crushing body blow to its sustainability.  Can the business survive?  Can the friendship survive?

 

All cultures have much to point to that makes them unique.  None holds a singular claim to resilience or courage.  Both Bell Grand and Birdie possess enough zest to light Vegas. Beautifully structured to expose their lives together as children in the south, graciously segueing to reveal their tenuous migration to Chicago as young adults and finally showing them where they stand today, on the brink of a unknown finale.  The connective tissues that clad this friendship in iron are laid bare.

 

Gardley’s telling of that journey counts as one of the play’s shining achievements.  He made it unique, personal and real.  The manner in which he portrays the way black women understand and talk to one another, the way the play uses the talents of its actors to perform multiple roles showcasing their versatility; and thereby adding to the plays efficiency.  All the while using music to cement the time references and keep heads boppin’ and fingers constantly poised to snap.  The incorporation of first tier voices to complement the soundtrack proves once again that there’s no equal to live performance at its best.

 

Set designer’s Kurtis Boetcher’s use of a stage wide photographic backdrop of famous black women, nearly all of them singers, perpetuated the themes of excellence, strength and beauty.

 

Accentuated with a shimmering cast that included stalwarts and starlets, the bones of the production stood solid.  Veteran Jacqueline Williams can always be counted on to delivery gold and she doesn’t miss her mark here as lion mother.  Greta Oglesby’s just a memorable and throws in ravishing vocals to embellish her acting chops.  Donica Lynn whose stint in Dreamgirls at the Porchlight had the town all aflutter hands in stellar work as both lady cop and the young Bell Grand.  Here the emphasis is on the acting and if there were any concerns her thespian skills lay in the shadow of that singular voice of hers; those doubts were jettisoned to oblivion.

 

Icing on the cake came in three flavors; Linda Bright Clay as First Lady, Camille Robinson as the young Birdie in one role and a little bit of an airhead personal assistant in another, and Jeffery Owen Freelon, Jr. as Lafayette, Bell’s socially engaged and fiscally inept son.  As First Lady, regally bourgeoisie and willfully patronizing, Clay’s much funnier than you’d expect and added wit, intelligence and even more spice to a potent brew.  Often referred to as First Ladies, preacher’s wives can count on a certain deference that extends far beyond their husband’s congregation.  Clay’s First Lady was no different with her wily wisdom and unexpected largess.  She sank into the role like it was plush mink, luxuriating in her character’s complexity.

 

A fresh face on the city’s stages, Camille Robinson charmed easily with both of her role assignments.  She made sliding from sassy to silly to sublime look like a stroll through clover.  And Freelon’s Lafayette nailed the naiveté of youth and the genuinely contrite.

 

Victory Gardens Theater

2433 N. Lincoln Ave.

Chicago, IL

 

Ends 3/19/17                      

 

Live long enough and there’s no telling what you might see.  Watching the Goodman’s wonderful production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Gloria, you’d never guess the playwright would be so unexpected.   As much as we may want to think we are past assumptions about who writes what and how, we still

connect dots in very specific ways.  Engrossing not only for its fast, very smart plot; drenched as it was in the look and language of the young, you’d think it the sole province of an astute wasp.   Only very small hints revealed this play was written by a brilliant young MacArthur award recipient who happens to be black.

 

Set in a New York magazine publishing office and peopled by characters who are disgruntled, anxious, angry, loquacious and most importantly, ambitious; the audience gets to see the underbelly of what’s considered a glamorous career.   It’s work that deifies literacy and the last place you’d expect to find carnage.

 

That’s where insight, understanding and creativity step in.  Combined in a particular way, where timing, dialogue and creativity gel into an alternate reality thriving with life on a stage, it becomes a kind of genius, too.

 

What would you do if you were young, bright, well educated, confident, in a prestigious work space and stuck.  Get out?  Chill because you were still under 25 and had wiggle room?  Scheme in order to advance?  What if you were approaching 30 or past 30 in a place that looked at anything over 27 as nearly mummified?

 

These are the questions Gloria explores and slides around like a serpent.  And remember, this is all happening in a very special place.  New York; a place that “runs on ambition”.

 

Broken up into 3 parts, you see the most visceral answer to those questions first.  Then you see what people plan to do post trauma.  In New York or Chicago or even Podunk Idaho for that matter, if you’re driven to succeed by any means necessary, ambition will vanquish morality every time.  The art here is to show how it’s done.  To hear how that ambition is rationalized and later crafted for profit.

 

There’s a whiff of a golden age on the Chicago stage these days.  The young are throwing down some awesome work.  Not only is the already much acclaimed playwright just creeping into his 30’s, the cherry cheeked cast who look as precious as cupids with their sleek skin and chicly outrageous banter happen to be killer actors.  Jennifer Kim as Kendra will stalk you in your nightmares. It’s dangerous to be that smart and that mean.  Kyle Beltran goes from privileged ingratiating intern on any fast track he chooses to homeboy barista in Starbucks as easily you dot an i.  Ryan Spahn’s Dean gives nobility to the doomed Everyman in the critical opening act and in Act 2 is the jerk tech guy anybody who’s ever worked in an office hates without a second thought. It’s a dream cast with some of them are following their parts from New York.  They are a delight to watch ply their craft.  Michael Crane deserves a special shout out for his splendid interpretation of Lorin, the fact checker guy.  Jacobs-Jenkins uses him as one of the higher profile threads that connects beginning to end.  One of the few voices, or perhaps he is actually the only voice of empathetic reason in the entire play, his understanding and analysis of the final outcome is of interest to no one on the stage.  You don’t keep it any more real than that.

 

 

Goodman Theater

170 N. Dearborn

1/14/17 – 2/19/17

 

 

 

AIDS has not disappeared.  It sits behind a curtain made up of time, forgetfulness and life extending drugs.  It’s lost all of its urgency and settled into treatable ever present danger mode.

It wasn’t always like that and in the play, Roz and Ray, currently running at Victory Gardens Theater; the full scope of the disease’s once swift and unrelenting fatality flares hot with its old intensity.

Using her father’s experience as a physician treating hemophiliac patients in the midst of the epidemics peak during the 80’s, playwright Karen Hartman recalls the tragic impact AIDS had on the parents and physicians of children.

 

Reliving those dark days during the play’s one act performance was difficult.  Framed from the perspective of a father whose twin hemophiliac sons are caught in a net of draconian medical bureaucracy, woefully inadequate knowledge of the disease and a cynical profit hungry pharmaceutical industry; the anger and anguish the disease once created exploded into life again.

 

Roz, the boys’ pediatrician, develops a close relationship with their father.  The depth of the doctor/parent intimacy challenges the imagination but the poignancy of the boys’ circumstances does not.   The reality is that in the late 70’s through the mid 80’s nearly half of the hemophiliacs in this country became infected with AIDS through a contaminated blood supply.  Roz and Ray tells the story of those people; the ones who don’t come to mind when you hear that word: AIDS.

 

On the evening of this viewing, the two characters, James Vincent Meredith as Ray and Mary Beth Fisher as Dr. Roz Kagan took some time to fall in sync and escape into the illusion of the story.  Once they did however, things got much more real.  The audience felt the frustration of a grieving father and understood his feelings of betrayal by a person and a system.  It also felt the exasperation of a doctor hamstrung by protocol and hounded by guilt.

 

Victory Gardens Theater

2433 N. Lincoln

 

11/11/16 – 12/11/16

 

The constellation of the elite is expanding in the American galaxy of exceptional playwrights.

Although he has been creating or interpreting as either an actor or a storyteller since the 70’s, Eugene Lee has attained a new high in writing excellence with his East Texas Hot Links.  An amazing mix of raw reality and Shakespearean lyricism, the play manages to move fast and tell a rich story about a segment of black America we don’t hear nearly enough about.  The true mark of a great play or story of any kind rests on its ability to sting with truth.  The kind that elicits that tiny gasp of recognition and surprise.  Lee accomplishes this as well as a Sophocles or an Arthur Miller or an August Wilson; to whom he’s often compared.  Linking the two is understandable.  The sheer beauty of the language each uses and the ever-present grit to which each pays homage binds them. But Lee’s style is rooted in different soil.

 

East Texas and Wilson’s Pittsburg certainly shared a common enemy.  Virulent racism was as familiar in the backwoods of East Texas as it was Pittsburg’s concrete streets.  In both places it was immovable, rigid, unsparing.  If there is a difference it is one of style rather than effect.  Where it might appear slightly veiled in Pittsburg; its East Texas guise is much more raw, open and brutish.  Escaping the suffocation of that most oppressive form of racism is the engine that drives the action in East Texas Hot Links.  Populated by some of the most captivating characters you’ve ever encountered on the set of a stage, the audience is reminded of the breath of the American experience and of how magnanimity can rise in the face of deadly challenge.  One that’s made more precarious with a Judas lying coiled in the mix.

 

A young kid, Delmus (Luce Metrius) just flowering into manhood meets a girl and dreams of moving to the big with his sweetheart.  Because everything depends on who these lovers are, the complex and tainted soil of east Texas makes this dream a desperate one. They’re both black, but she’s got enough white blood in her to be “claimed” by the other side.  That makes her off limits.  Although you never meet her on stage, every indication points to her using her flowing hair and fair skin to lure young black men into a lethal trap.

 

The play opens innocuously enough.  Filled with charm and light-hearted revelry of people in their safe place, we’re dropped into a small rural bar off in the woods.  A black rural bar where people come to comfortably shed their defenses and spend time with folks they’ve known all of their lives.  Having inherited the bar from her father, a shapely and pretty proprietress Charlesetta (Tyla Abercrumble) runs the place with genuine hospitality on one hand and a bat in the other for anybody who doesn’t understand that no means no.

 

The people in this room know each other as intimately as blood relations.  They grew up together and married into each other’s families.  They know each other’s habits, peculiarities and flaws.  Much is tolerated as long as all present abide by one unspoken maxim:  You may not get the respect you deserve out there, but you’ll get at least that here.

 

The wit and charm Lee brings to his characters fill the theater with their abundance.  Ray Moore’s (Kelvin Roston Jr.) a regular at the bar and flirts with Charlesetta relentlessly.  He’s got as much chance of success as Santa Claus does in going on a cookie diet at Christmas.  Even though there’s a tiny bit of heat there, you recognize this teasing; true seduction.   A game among friends.

 

When the conversation travels to the mysterious deaths of two young men Delmus’s age on a construction site, the motives behind the largesse of the Judas slowly reveal themselves.  XL Dancer (Namir Smallwood) constantly talks up his importance to his white boss and one begins to question just how far his loyalty to this boss extends.  Why is XL so adamant about Delmus taking a job with this boss who has a reputation of conscious mistreatment of black workers?

 

It’s here the play plunges you into the roiling waters of chance.  Just as a hungry man will kill to eat, a greedy man will sacrifice life to prosper.  Whose life is sacrificed can be surprising as this wonderfully engrossing story reveals.  A.C. Reed as the clairvoyant card shark Boochie once again shows what a delightful chameleon he is.

 

Nothing could have been a more refreshing surprise than Buckshot (Antoine Pierre).  Think Paul Bunyan with swag or maybe Paul Robeson totally down.  Big big presence infused with nuclear joie de vivre and the courage of Samson.

 

Writer Theater

325 Tudor Ct.

Glencoe, IL 

 

There’s a lot to be said about a story that can move with the speed and grace of a cheetah and that is genuinely good. Cocked hit all of its entertainment targets with ease. A couple in Chicago’s trendy Andersonville own a condo above a toxically nasty neighbor. It’s Chicago and it’s Andersonville where unorthodox couples are the norm. The couple is lesbian. One is black. The other white. All good. Except the ex-Marine downstairs who goes out of his way to taunt them with loud military music and a constantly barking dog is not down with the black thing. And probably not the lesbian thing either. So far we’re ringing very true to life.

 

Taylor (Kelli Simkins), the white half, practices law. Izzie’s (Patrese McClain) journalist covering the city’s endless killing season. Professional and articulate, the language they use between themselves is intelligent, considered, incisive and often amusing enough to provoke a wry smile. Izzie is well aware of the need to get away from the loner and potential killing machine downstairs before he goes Columbine. Taylor is resisting because she’s afraid of taking a bath when they sale the condo.

 

Enter Taylor’s hilarious but totally nuts brother, Frank (Mike Tepeli). Everybody either has a Frank or knows of one. Can’t keep a job of any kind, knows absolutely everything, has con artist so deeply ingrained in his DNA that he thinks it’s normal and always looking for a handout. And in this case, he could also easily be nicknamed Destructo. Frank’s supposed to be living with Mom in Iowa or someplace but he just pops up at his sister’s for some vague reason secretly packing cold steel.

 

A good con artist first assesses. Then he ensnares. And finally he acts. That’s Frank. Once he finds out about Mr. Timebomb downstairs, Frank decides to man up and take care of this problem; with the ultimate objective of enriching himself. He instead sets in motion a series of events that puts them all in mortal danger. It’s those events that make up the meat of the play and they are delicious. True suspense descends and saturates the play. Dread and desperation combine and swirl both around and through all of them.   It’s during this escalation of fear that a number of revelations surface which could easily destabilize or even destroy the relationship itself.

 

The audience as well as the characters are forced to confront the reality of living in a gun culture. As Izzie sees it, the gun debate has already been lost. To survive the losers have to decide whether they will arm themselves to simply survive. Grappling with that decision butts against other realities that are true of many major American cities; particularly Chicago. The discounting or even discrediting of grievances from the black citizenry by the police factors into Izzie’s decision not to seek their help when it would seems absolutely the right thing to do. Cocked brings ugly and unsettling realities to the surface and makes you see them if not confront them. Left with only one recourse to defend yourself against volatile and lethal force, what would you do? That is the ultimate question the play asks and it does so very powerfully and beautifully.

 

Congratulations to playwright Sarah Gubbins for presenting an aspect of city life you don’t see very often and exposing the the complexity of the commonplace. Using dialogue that is bright and sharp, Gubbins doesn’t blink when true grit is needed to make a point that is both artistic and provocative.

 

I had one point of confusion. Izzie and Taylor, in their speech, sound perfectly suited to one another. But they don’t look compatible. It’s a question of types; not colors. If their few moments of mild affection looked more sincere on stage it may not have been so concerning. Fortunately, it wasn’t a distraction that hobbled or blighted the production. It simply remained a curiosity.

 

Both McClain and Simkins melted into their characters beautifully; making it a joy to watch them do their dance of drama. Tepelli’s Frank, like the dowager Countess on Dalton Abbey, got all of the best lines and he delivered them with consummate skill. His Frank was unqualified treat.