Playwright: Keith Huff. At: Lookingglass Theater at the Water Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave. Tickets: 312-337-0665; www.lookingglasstheatre.org; $36-$70 . Runs through: Aug. 11
That severed head in the plastic bag featured so prominently last spring in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is back, sharing the stage with a talking Modigliani sculpture, a prosthetic cranial-injury, and some charred corpses incinerated in mid-copulation. Their co-stars are a pair of hard-boiled police detectives, a soft-boiled insurance inspector, a surly street thug, a bimbo with ambitions, and two couplesone poor and romantic, one rich and not so much married as mergered. The universe is that of classic pulp fiction, but the Modigliani (which does not resemble the Maltese Falcon) assures us in the prologue that the play we are about to see is a comedy.
You can hardly blame playwright Keith Huff, the author of A Steady Rain and no stranger to urban grit, for indulging in a spoof of the literary genre that made him his fortune. Thanks to Martin McDonagh, Quentin Tarantino and their followers, the line between Grand Guignol and Freakshow Farce has never been more permeable. With faux noir, however, there is always the danger of undisciplined presentation reducing it to the kind of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink melée that grows swiftly soporific.
Director David Schwimmer is blessed with connections enabling him to conduct new play try-outs in full-scale big-budget equity productions, so perhaps this Big Lake, Big City world premiere should be regarded as a work-in-progress. Five days after opening, it already evidences the jettisoning of unnecessary galley porcelain to give Huff's rat-a-tat repartee breathing room. More de-cluttering is still in order, however, before this Hollywood-expat summer project hits the big time: the solitary "meta" gag, the TV quote requiring a verbal footnote, irreverent morgue attendants more M*A*S*H* than CSI, our hero's marital troubles and his recurring proclivity for trashing his office.
A seasoned ensemble brings expertise sufficient to impose a veneer of depth on characters written as comic book-thin archetypes. Unsurprisingly, the actors assigned the fewest physical stunts come off better than those encumbered with too much gratuitous scenic slapstick. (Philip R. Smith may have the best lines, but Danny Goldring's delivery nails the tonal authenticity with every syllable.) Anyway, it's rare for Lookingglass to do lightweight fare, and a live-action cartoon replete with Windy City geographical nods should prove suitable vacation viewing for tourists seeking a safe introduction to Chicago's fabled mean streets.