Playwright: Josh Nordmark. At: Nothing Special Productions at The Den, 1333 N. Milwaukee Ave. Tickets: 773-398-7028; www.brownpapertickets.com; $17. Runs through: Sept. 2
The seeds of three distinct narratives can be detected in Josh Nordmark's play, all waiting for their author to make up his mind which one to cultivate. The first is a steamy costume-drama premised on a beautiful, sensitive, proudly uneducated damsel courted by two effete artists of differing aesthetic and temperament. The second is a commentary on how Western colonialism destroys everything it touches, and the third re-affirms the ironic adage about legend enduring after truth has been long forgotten.
Our rival suitors are Henry, a fastidious anthropologist who documents his findings in pencil-drawings, and Fauntleroy, a romantic voluptuary whose florid paintings fetch high prices among his European countrymen. The earthly muse they pursue is named, appropriately, "Verse". They wear modern clothessometimes suggesting period fashions, as with a 1970s-vintage granny-dress substituting for a Regency gownand speak a polyglot idiom veering between PBS-Victorian and FOX-vernacular. The natives of the unidentified tropics where most of the action is set are clad in likewise generic "tribal" gear and keep silent, not even conferring with one another. The jungle events are presented in flashback, framed by encounters in a museum where the artists' pictures are exhibited, centuries later.
European expatriates are not the only people lost in unfamiliar territory. Nordmark's intent may have been to illustrate the pervasiveness of the dynamic he purports to explore by offering no specific clues to locate us in time and place. Unlike characters in a play, however, an audience unsure of its immediate environment is an audience irrevocably impaired in its intellectual focus. No sooner do we acclimate to 19th-century speech and manners, than a servant's remark on the "punch line" of a joke upsets our orientation, much as the lofty ideas argued by the white male personae are undermined by stereotypical "exotic" images.
Inevitably, Verse surrenders to primal values, Fauntleroy to his appetites and Henry to his Rousseauan idealssubmission rendered mildly engaging by the valiant efforts of Matt Drake, Scott Danielson and Celeste Burns (along with a curiously self-effacing performance by Daniel Vuillaume, playing a sly and inexplicably underwritten valet). The technical effects also hint at ambitious and unfulfilled plans, but what's chiefly missing is a script to give purpose to these underdeveloped elements. Sadly, in trying to say too much at once, the playas it now reads, anywayends up saying nothing.