Playwright: Calamity West. At: The Ruckus Theater at the Side Project, 1439 W. Jarvis Ave. Tickets: 773-973-2150; www.ruckustheater.org; $15. Runs through: July 22
Costumers do it frequently: A script calls for an Armani suit, so the stitchers piece together assorted garmentsa thrift-shop Ralph Lauren jacket here, some cast-off Tommy Hilfiger trousers thereand if they do their job right, what emerges is attire looking almost like the real thing. What the Ruckus Theatre ensemble has done is to read everything by, and about, Anton Chekhov before constructing an original play in the style of that Russian playwright, withoutand this is the challengethe results coming off like a gaggle of drama students swilling vodka shots the day after final exams.
Our setting is the antebellum Branwell mansion, circa 2007 (indicated by news items figuring in conversation). Siblings Olivia and Andrew are the sole residents now, following their parents' death in an automobile accident doing indelible damage to the tree in their front lawn. Helping Olivia with her household duties is sister-in-law Margaret, once destined to marry Andrew, but now wed to his adopted brother Sean, a writer of ponderously-titled novels. Frequent visitors include Steve Darden, Sean's eccentric editor, and Leigh Jones, Olivia's bubbly ex-school chum. We gradually learn that a mortgage on the home, taken out by unemployed Andrew, now threatens its foreclosure.
What lend these microcosmic proceedings the genuine Chekhovian flavoras opposed to, say, A.R. Gurneyare the silences before characters are spurred to break the stillness. Indeed, our story opens with Andrew sipping an afternoon whiskey and staring out the window, his unprotesting torpor so pronounced that by the time he speculates aloud upon his habit of soliloquizing, any humor we might find in this remark has likewise waned. Steve, on the other hand, refuses to succumb to stifling ennui, his defiance expressed in impulsive utterances, typically followed by surprise at his own daring.
Playgoers versed in Chekhov's Greatest Hits will appreciate the deftness with which Calamity West folds motifs from the source material into a text giving the impression of a four-act play, despite actually running only 100 minutes. The most welcome element in this company-based effort, however, is its absence of weapons to tempt those in despair to offstage suicide attempts. The Prozorovs, Ranevskys, Voynitskis and Sorins may have seen no escape from crippling inertia, but this is the United States in the 21st centuryan age offering the Branwell clan a promise of moving forward toward redemption, and maybe even a kind of happiness.