Playwright: Rodney Ackland. At: Gift Theatre, 4802 N. Milwaukee Ave. Tickets: 773-283-7071; www.thegifttheatre.org; $20-$30. Runs through: April 29
If Chekhov is credited with inaugurating the sit-and-chat play, Maxim Gorky took it out of the parlors and into the dives. Rodney Ackland's 1951 group portrait of post-WWII London proposes a "private" club where assorted bohemian-fringe types fraternize in defiance of pre-war caste systems. (Even the occasional U.S. soldier is allowed access.) For this effrontery, his candid depiction of carpe diem profligacy and ambisexual promisc uity would find itself eclipsed by John Osborne's "kitchen-sink"—and therefore, strictly working-class—drama six years later.
The club is a first-floor bar/restaurant called La Vie En Rose (the play's original title being The Pink Room), boasting a gramophone, black-market cuisine and a surprising array of alcoholic beverages. This is fortunate, since drinking and smoking (relax, the cigarettes are props) are the favored activity of her customers: queer would-be writer Hugh Marriner, his fussbudget boyfriend, his bluestocking mother and his swaggering agent; flirtatious Elizabeth, her devoted Austrian consort and her handsome USAF boy-toy; imperious art-critic R.B. Monody and her obsequious chauffeur; and drunken artist Michael, dotty spinster Julia and free-thinking sidewalk evangelist Madge (preaching to the club's denizen's through the window). Overseeing this motley brood are proprietor Christine and long-suffering waitress Doris.
Fitting 21 actors onto a 13-by-22-foot stage (with the street door to Milwaukee Avenue contributing offstage urban ambience) is not easy, but even with Sheldon Patinkin's primary directorial duties reduced to the traffic variety, in this intimate space, the cast—some playing cross-gender or alternatively mobile roles—create immediately engaging personalities. (When a GI displays snapshots, we crane our necks in an effort to see them.) The action encompasses only two weeks, during which we witness citizens dispatched to rebuild broken cities and lives, while others linger to watch their world crumble like the bombed-out ruins of their stalwart metropolis.
Configuring a three-hour drama (with one intermission) to the comfort levels of modern audiences may, likewise, seem daunting, but not for nothing does the playbill proclaim "The Gift is an ensemble" (albeit with Michael Patrick Thornton's rendering of lovable hustler Marriner anchoring the empathy from his first entrance). Assisted by period-perfect tech design—special commendation to dialect coach Eva Breneman—the cohesive flow of activity onstage makes the time pass as swiftly and smoothly as the waters of the Thames.
