Playwright: Mia McCullough
At: Stage Left, 3408 N. Sheffield
Phone: (773) 883-8830; $15-$20
Runs through: May 24
Some fine performances mark Stage Left's latest production, the Midwest premiere of Mia McCullough's Cyber Serenade. Director Kevin Heckman has put together a mostly fine ensemble who have the remarkable ability to work together as well as they do alone. This little group knows how to react, as well as act.
That's a shame because this group of actors is saddled with a script that might have been fresh 10 years ago, when the electronic world of the Internet and its other offshoots of easy electronic connection was a brave new world, something to wonder about. A decade or so ago, the information highway was a rutted road, inspiring imaginations and causing the kind of projection that brought up all sorts of dreams, fears, and controversies. But today, McCullough's story of how a family deconstructs under the weight of easy links through Internet chat rooms, e-mail, and cellular phones is tired. This play needed to be written at a time when it was difficult not to sit next to someone on the El who was chattering away on their cell, letting some unknown person at the other end that they were now at Fullerton and would be home in five minutes. It might have been interesting when romantic liaisons weren't as easily obtained as phoning for a pizza. It might have sparked our fascination if e-mail wasn't now such a commonplace part of everyday life. In order for this material to work, playwright McCullough needed to mine harder to find something new to say. Instead she opts for mediocre soap opera, dressing it up in the clothes of the electronic age to attempt to fool us into thinking it's something better.
Ellen (Jane Delaubenfels) and Dan (Craig Bryant) are yuppie professionals with a teenage daughter (an on-target Suzanne Cobb), who have become estranged because of his cell phone use (which, along with the Internet, leads to his reunion—and affair with—his high school sweetheart) and her inability to get herself away from her computer. Daughter Ari is the only smart one in the play as she watches her family crumble in the first act.
In the second act, everyone is reunited when Dan has a car accident while chatting with his mistress on his cell phone and the entire cast realize that they need the power of real human connection, recognize their addictions, and live happily ever after. It's weak stuff, and not worth seeing.
Even the addition of a few tarted up conceits, like the badly overplayed host and mascot of the electronic age dubbed the 'Void,' a backlit screen with stale computerized images, and two black-garbed minions who hover around the proceedings, add nothing. Cyber Serenade is the saddest kind of theater: well done but bereft of intellectual or artistic nourishment.
