Playwright: Terrence McNally
At: Heartland Café Studio,
7016 N. Glenwood
Tickets: $15-$20
Phone: (773) 275-2201
Runs through: Feb. 9
Long before playwright Terrence McNally was adding to his opus with works like Kiss of the Spider Woman, Corpus Christi, and Love! Valour! Compassion!, Shakespeare was laying out McNally's thesis for Frankie and Johnny when he wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream. The bard said, 'The course of true love never did run smooth.' At its heart, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune is an old-fashioned love story, taking us through the ups and downs of two lost souls as they discover the possibility of love within each other. It's a relatively timeless theme, probably being played out long before Shakespeare himself put pen to paper.
What makes McNally's take on the 'course of true love' refreshing, and different, is the affection he has for his characters. Frankie is a waitress in a Manhattan diner, pushing middle age and scarred (both literally and figuratively) by past attempts at love, she has lost all interest in romance. That is until a coworker, the short order cook Johnny, comes along. The two share a passionate one-night stand (the graphic sounds of which open the play). Johnny, past 50, and with his own satchel of disappointing love woes burdening him, is the more optimistic, still charmed by the moon outside and the possibility of genuine human connection. And so the dance begins: after the sex, Frankie and Johnny weave and jab like boxers in the game of love. Frankie wants to fix Johnny a meat loaf sandwich and see him out the door, so she can return to her bed alone. Johnny wants to convince Frankie that, even though they've just connected outside of work, he loves her and that their fragile union, unless seized, may wither away. Act one ends on a sweet note (literally, to a classical piece on the radio that Johnny has dedicated to Frankie). When we see them again, in Act Two, a little time has transpired … and the effects of time on the relationship are apparent. The pair is watching TV in bed; Johnny has wrestled with impotence. There's more tension in this scene, but in the end, the pair come to a kind of rapprochement when each unburdens their deepest fears and secrets to one another, bringing them together in a more meaningful union.
Pyewacket, under the direction of Linda LeVeque, is perfectly suited for this intimate material, all of which takes place in Frankie's cramped, care-worn studio apartment. The close space of the Heartland Café Studio just makes everything more immediate. Garrett West's set perfectly captures the feel of Frankie's tiny apartment, making real the loss of Frankie's dreams and her acceptance of her own reality.
But it's the performances in this two-character play that ultimately make it succeed or fail. And this Frankie and Johnny succeeds … based largely on the touching, real performance of Kate Harris. Harris creates a flesh and blood woman that we can sympathize with, root for, and understand. Her performance, not a bit flashy, is perfectly realized; she disappears into the character so completely we are left to wonder what Frankie will be doing after the stage lights go down. As Johnny, David Tatosian, is quite adequate and believable. He isn't quite up to the level of Harris, and the small scale of the play makes the inequality that much more obvious.
But all in all this is the kind of small theater I often hope to see and seldom do: heartfelt, warm, inspired, and infinitely pleasing.
