Playwright: Erik Gernand. At: The Fine Print Theatre Company at The Alley Stage of Profiles Theatre, 4147 N. Broadway. Tickets: www.thefineprinttheatre.org; $25. Runs through: May 4
The LGBTQ community in America has made incredible strides in the past few years when it has come to gaining more equal rights and increasing societal acceptance. But there is plenty of lingering pain and anger from when times weren't nearly so enlightened, which is what playwright Erik Gernand explores in his world premiere family drama A Place in the Woods for The Fine Print Theatre Company.
Gernand's play largely centers on a family crisis that forces a fortysomething Chicago gay filmmaker named Shaun McAllister ( James Bould ), to return to his hometown of Hunter, Ind., with his biological teenage son, Alex ( Jacob Bond ), in tow.
Shaun's mother, Linda ( Barbara Berndt ), is starting to mentally slip into dementia, while his alcoholic brother, Brady ( Mike Rice ), hasn't been the best caretaker.
What starts as a thorough and forced clean-up of the ramshackle McAllister home ( emphasized by set designer Katie-Bell Springmann's stylized white-painted and black-outline cardboard scenery ) ultimately unearths a well of bad memories and family recriminations. Though everyone in the family is accepting of Shaun's homosexuality today, things weren't so rosy back in the 1980s when Shaun and Brady were teenagers.
Gernand uses the inquisitive Alex to prod most of these feelings out of his relatives as he tries to find out information about Shaun and Brady's late high school friend, T.J. This device is good way of building up a sense of mystery, but one gets the feeling that Gernand could have trimmed some flab from his script to make A Place in the Woods less meandering and more dramatically taught and to the point.
Director Patrick Kenney generally draws good performances from his cast, especially with the teary emotional outbursts that turn on the waterworks near the end. But most of the time, the cast feels a tad too self-conscious when it comes to other events, like dodging the uncomfortable questions raised by Alex or dealing with the unplanned appearances of police officer Cherry ( Natasha Tsoutsouris, who is a bit too aware that her character is there largely for comic relief ).
What happened in the past is clearly still haunting the remaining McAllister family members in A Place in the Woods, which serves as a potent reminder of how far the people have come in the LGBTQ community from just a few decades ago. Though A Place in the Woods could do with some judicial pruning, it's still a strong work that shows the lingering damage of ignorance and homophobia in one particular family.