Playwright: Mark Roberts. At: American Blues Theatre at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln Phone: 773-871-3000; $32-$40. Runs through: May 22
Just as every urban center is presumed to harbor twisted serial killers armed with state-of-the-art weapons, rural neighborhoods in popular fiction are invariably populated with hard-drinking bullies who delight in slaughtering one another with no more finesse than they would extend butchered livestock or felled treeshey, what's the use of all that industrial equipment, if not to terrorize sheltered middle-class audiences? And though Tracy Letts' Killer Joe put a comic spin on the Deliverance genre in 1991, the archetypes remain the same.
In the downstate Illinois town whose name invites the titular pun, they are represented by a quartet of familiar rubes: Gary, the brawny lug with his brains firmly lodged in his pants. Debbie, the salty-talking disgruntled wife. Rallis, the wimpish husband doomed to mistreatment by his peers. Meanwhile, cat-owning spinster Callie is so relentlessly cheerful that five minutes after meeting her, we anticipate her participation in some grisly violence.
We anticipate many other things, too. Mark Roberts' success as a writer of television comedies has given him an ear for witty dialoguealong with a palpable craving for the vulgarity prohibited by network censorsbut not the focus required to sustain a 90-minute story. Not only do his characters utter such signpost declarations as "I'm up to my ears in rage and resentment," but base their decisions more in narrative expediency than in personal revelation: when Rallis waves a firearm around the room, he does it so ineptly that we know that he won't shoot at anyone (he doesn't even accidentally let off a shot that breaks something, ho-ho-ho), and when the plot requires him to turn the gun on himself, we also know that he will bungle his suicide attempt so that he can return in the next scene for some likewise occasion-driven Weekend-At-Bernie's shtick.
It can be argued, of course, that a cast with Kate Buddeke, Francis Guinan, Alan Wilder and Heather Graeff could sell anything and, under Erin Quigley's direction, they struggle valiantly to lend substance to this live-action cartoon. However, unless you consciously distance yourself from the universe presented by Roberts for our amusement and scornwhy shouldn't the managers of a Dairy Queen take their jobs seriously, for chrissakes?the fates of the players in Rantoul's low-stakes intrigue will offer no more suspense than the hayseed clichés making up the author's inspiration.