Playwright: Ron Riekki At: Ruckus Theater at the Side Project, 1439 W. Jarvis. Phone: 773-769-7257; $15. Runs through: Sept. 26
In 1980, Jeffrey M. Jones wrote Seventy Scenes of Halloween, a play in which a young suburban couple's marriage erodes as they undergo a series of encounters with demons, real and imagined, while waiting for trick-or-treaters to haunt their doorstep. This Pinteresque premise rendered it popular on the regional circuit for a timelocal playgoers may recall productions by the Chicago Viewpoints and Neo-Futurist companies during the 1990s.
Ron Riekki recalls none of these things. According to his playbill testimony, his knowledge of Jones' enigmatic drama is restricted to its title. Thus, the only resemblance between Riekki's All Saints' Day: 44 Plays About Jeffrey Jones and its prototype is its fundamental interaction: someone outside a house petitions someone inside for a ceremonial boon.
Some of the thematic variations in this Ruckus Theater production exhibit commendable originality: the nerdy boy whose foam-penis headgear inflames a mousy agoraphobe, or the red-hooded damsel who receives a full-blown exorcism at the hands of a zealot bent on saving her pagan soul. Some are refreshingly simple, as when a celebrant in a wheelchair finds himself prevented by porch steps from ringing the doorbell. Some are eerie, like the pair of necromancers who offer occult prayers for the dead on this, their designated holiday. Others are painfully predictablewhen one character appears costumed in a Liberty mask and the other in a serape and sombrero, we already know what to expect. Ditto the sound of chopper blades and artillery fire. And the faux ad-libbed sequence overstays its welcome.
The point of this exercise is not its literary content, however, but the opportunities its execution offers for performers to showcase their creative skills. For example, an episode involving a woman beset by media overload requires her scene partner to adopt a dizzying array of voices at channel-surf speed, while the aforementioned revivalist rhetoric demands vocal immersion commensurate with operatic arias, as does that of the foreign agents who lure unwary abductees with candy-snatching games.
Under Brian Ruby's direction, Elizabeth Bagby and Kevin Crispin embrace the challengedon't forget the lightning costume changes and the murder victim planted in the audiencewith intensely focused enthusiasm, ably supported by Matthew Humphrey as the silent but likewise mercurial placard-bearer ( the scenes are presented nonsequentially, so don't try to count them ) to bring their lively paced vaudeville home in a brisk 90 minutes.