Playwright: Rhett Rossi
At: Profiles Theatre at the
Main Stage, 4137 N. Broadway
Tickets: 773-549-1815; www.profilestheatre.com; $35-$40
Runs through: Oct. 13
When a play offers its personnel no hope of reversal from suffering, its audience must choose whether to share the pain, or to escape behind an emotional barrier. Only the possibilityno matter how slightof the wuss ultimately turning the tables on the bully prevents us prematurely resigning ourselves to the former's defeat, or, worse, identifying with the bully. This factor is what distinguishes prison, disaster and crime fiction earning our empathy from the paint-by-numbers variety, good only for a cheap squirm.
Rhett Rossi's play opens in a shabby double room at a motel adjacent to a penitentiary where convicted pedophile Mitch has just been released, his body scarred from his fellow inmates' abuse, after serving a 10-year sentence. He is accompanied by his younger brother, Roy, who shares the childhood trauma that sent Mitch on his destructive path, but who has evaded that same fate with the aid of a quasi-shintoistic faith. These men are not buffoons. They are hopelessthat is, they are bereft of the hope necessary to make something of their livesbut they have dignity, and that dignity is enough to give us hope. Our drifters will grapple with murder, terror, physical and psychological excruciation, but we stay by their sidesthrough mud, blood, vomit, nudity, vulgarity, homophobia, racism and other obligatory motifs in the rural-noir literary genrein anticipation of our sadsacks acquiring a sense of self-worth.
There is no denying the comic-book aspects of a tale where the villain's head is tattooed with a swastika, his face with multiple "double-eights," his jacket emblazoned with a confederate flag and his mouth spewing forth white-supremacist dogma. Indeed, it's easy to imagine lazier productions reveling in stereotypical hicks-and-icks guffawsdid I mention the Weekend-At-Bernie's shtick involving a trussed-up corpse?but Profiles director Joe Jahraus rejects the easy road, instead instructing company regular Darrell W. Cox (doing his trademark laconic turn) and veteran character actor Larry Neumann Jr. to explore each step in the spiritual progress of the siblings suddenly discovering the power to protect one another.
Rossi's parable of deliverance, running a tight 90 minutes, is not for the the faint of heart (or weak of stomach). That said, playgoers can find respite from the intensity by focusing skyward to Jeffrey Levin's string band, providing precision-pitched incidental music underscoring a plot as gritty as it is redemptive.