Playwright: Michel Marc Bouchard
At: Journeymen Theater Company at Holy Covenant United Methodist Church, 925 W. Diversey
Phone: 773-857-5395, Tickets: $12
Runs through: June 10
by Mary Shen Barnidge
There was, in fact, a revival of romanticism in French literature just previous to 1912, when most of Lilies takes place. But author Michel Marc Bouchard's play is less interested in theatrical history than in fashioning an homage to the sensual spirituality of the fin-de-siècle. To that end, he has forged a theoerotic fantasy populated by an all-male tribe uniformly beautiful, sensitive and queer as chocolate-chip communion wafers.
The action opens in 1952, when His Excellency Bishop Jean Bilodeau, on a visit to a prison inmate, finds himself taken hostage by a flock of jailbirds who proceed to—put on a show! Their text accuses the priest of wronging two of his chums 40 years earlier—the expatriate Count Vallier de Tilly, long dead, and his lover, Simon Doucet, the prisoner now serving a life sentence for the former's murder. Other personalities portrayed by the company of convicts include Doucet's abusive father and Vallier's daffy mother, along with a demimondaine who offers to provide Doucet with het assurance, and a drama coach whose voluptuous depictions of the saints earn the censure of his charges' parents.
Since the saint in question is—who else?—Sebastian, it is only logical that the adolescent Vallier and Doucet court one another in the language of martyr and executioner to fabricate an ethos in which homicide at the hands of one's beloved is ultimate proof of love and mercy, a devastating expression of scorn.
Only a romantic could take this drivel seriously. But under Frank Pullen's disciplined direction, the Journeymen commit themselves so wholly to Bouchard's world of sweaty gazes, passionate lip-locks and wet-eyed farewells that we never ask where the guards are in this prison, or by what favors the incarcerated Doucet enlisted the aid of his fellow stir-buddies in this dangerous charade.
As the young Vallier and Doucet, Ben Zolno and Daniel Rangel are required to do little beyond pose prettily and keep their faces impassive. Jean Paul Menou does a sharp Sal Mineo impression as the envious young Bilodeau, while Mark Douglas-Jones and Lawrence Garner share some suitably somber scenery-chewing as the adult Doucet and Bilodeau. But James Eldrenkamp steals the show as the nostalgic Countess de Tilly, delicately suspending our disbelief with a conviction as bare of camp mockery as a baptismal gown.