Playwright: Sharr White. At: Profiles Theatre at the Alley Stage, 4137 N. Broadway. Tickets: 773-549-1815; www.profilestheatre.org; $35-$40. Runs through: July 20
When artists are on a creative roll, they often ignore housekeeping chores and personal hygiene in their quest to concentrate on their work. This may explain why, when we first encounter reclusive emphysema-racked poet Ulysses, he is wearing nothing but an apron and an oxygen tank, and his trailer in the Colorado Rockies contains a refrigerator filled with rotting meat. The project commanding his focus is not the 150-stanza epic named for the mountain in the Himalayas—that was completed before the start of our play—but a slow and unobstructed death in retribution for the terrible deed that, twenty years earlier, caused his wife to flee with their child.
His penance is interrupted by the abrupt re-entry of ex-spouse Emma, dressed in a trim beige pantsuit and dragging fashionably wheeled luggage. She promptly sets about restoring order to Ulysses' domain. Her mission is not reconciliation, however, but deception. Their now 25-year-old son has announced his intention of confronting the father he barely remembers—a prospective reunion, Emma insists, requiring a quick and thorough pre-emptive makeover.
We never see the son who ( we are told ) received severe facial injuries on that fatal day, when mummy was away from home and daddy was lost to alcoholic blackout. Since the boy claimed not to remember the events leading to his being found unconscious and promptly spirited away by his protective materfamilias, we never learn the facts behind the incident, either. For that matter, there are many things we don't learn in Sharr White's script, which is riddled with more holes than Ulysses' tattered wardrobe. Ah, but a play featuring a single set, two characters, contemporary dress, nudity, onstage food preparation, an under-90-minute running time and subtext-heavy dialogue ( arcing tidily to its climax at precisely the two-thirds mark ) for—ahem!—mature actors will always enjoy a popular following on the suburban/scene-study/studio circuit.
Darrell W. Cox and Lia D. Mortensen, abetted by Eric Bugher's direction, take full advantage of their storefront auditorium's intimate environment, reveling in the hangdog charisma and manic-edged alacrity constituting their respective stock-in-trades, with an intensity riveting our attention for every second of the 70 minutes it takes to exorcise—well, sort of—the demons of guilt, flight and denial. Playwright White is also to be commended for not turning the poet's literary craft into a joke or a plot convenience—when we hear the first lines of Ulysses' magnum op, we get a glimpse of the man with whom Emma fell in love so long ago.
