Playwright: Johnna Adams . At: Profiles Theatre at the Alley, 4147 N. Broadway. Tickets: 773-549-1815; www.profilestheatre.org; $35-$40 . Runs through: March 19
The play's title leads us to anticipate a procedural: we learn early in the play that Gideon Gibson, following his suspension from school, appeared before his mother with a bloodied face and a note from his teacher requesting a conferenceand that same night, committed suicide. The dramatic action revolves around the efforts of his mom and his instructor to discover the circumstances behind his desperate acta tangled web involving a girl called Seneca, a boy called Jake and a fantasy-fiction fable of a student uprising, with the slaughter of adults described in terms as graphically gory aswell, the ancient myths that Gideon's fifth-grade class is studying.
Was the 11-year-old author of these grisly images a perverse corrupter of innocence, as spinster-schoolmarm Heather insists? Or were his accounts of battle trophies fashioned from the entrails of butchered enemies intended to mimic the epic poems recited to him by Mama Corryn, herself a professor of Medieval literature? We can argue that eye-gougings and throat-slittings are no more horrific than what youngsters nowadays encounter in zombie-wars video gamesor prayer-books in certain churches, for that matterbut we also understand why a mentor to preteens might declare such material unsuitable reading for her charges.
It's a provocative question, and one that is never answered, since playwright Johnna Adams seems less interested in solving mysteries than in discussing them, shoveling in a profusion of sidebars, op-eds and red herrings: Heather's previous career in advertising, a hushed-up pedophilia scandal six months previous, a shout-out to the Marquis de Sade ( presumably inserted for the benefit of us yahoos ignorant of Gilgamesh, Beowulf or the significance of Gideon's name ), the stifling of creative imagination, the conspicuous absence of the school principal ( but not parents in Lake Forest, Ill., who christen their daughters "Seneca"as if this were Los Angeles ).
The confrontational dynamic's progress is further protracted by Adams' propensity for inserting serial tacits into her written text ( published in American Theatre magazine ), so that a dozen "speeches" may be voiced with less than five words. Under Joe Jahraus' direction, Amy J. Carle and Laura Hooper retain their gravity with admirable aplombeven after Heather's diabetic cat joins the list of disclosuresfor the 80 minutes necessary to bring it all to catharsis, but when Corryn huffs, "I would think that the reasons for [my son's] suspension would have come up in the first half hour of conversation," we share her impatience.