Playwright: Lanford Wilson
At: Eclipse Theatre Company at Victory Gardens, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Phone: ( 773 ) 871-3000; $18-$22;
Runs through: Sept. 11
Looking at the body of dramatic work generated in the incubator of New York's Caffe Cino during the late '50s and early '60s, you can't help but marvel at its sheer volume. Did presenting 'a play' at that venue include material perks for the artists—coffee and rolls on the house, say—in addition to the artistic opportunity to test their craft before an audience?
Whatever the circumstances, Eclipse Theatre had an abundance of sketches, exercises and dialogues to choose from when assembling their bill of one-act plays by Lanford Wilson, the Missouri playwright who would someday write Balm In Gilead, The Hot L Baltimore, Burn This and other late 20th-century American classics. The final cut ranges from The Madness Of Lady Bright, premiering in 1963, to the 1990 monologue, The Moonshot Tape. Other selections include Sextet ( YES ) from 1969, Days Ahead and This Is the Rill Speaking—the latter a prototype for The Rimers Of Eldritch and later, Book Of Days—from 1965. And Ikke, Ikke, Nye, Nye, Nye—try to get THAT title out of your mind in a hurry—from 1970.
Six plays, however brief, make for a lot of scene changes at one single-intermission sitting, and the personnel of the Eclipse ensemble are to be commended for their co-operation in keeping the pace brisk without ever seeming hurried ( with the exception of Steven Fedoruk's overly-busy portrayal of Lady Bright's aging drag queen ) . The farcical Ikke/Nye ( featuring Trap Door veteran Marzena Bukowska as a grotesque would-be debauchée ) proceeds at appropriately loony-tunes speed under the direction of Jay Paul Skelton, but never do Gregory Hardigan as a Norman Bates-styled obsessive in Days Ahead ( Thomas Jones directing ) or CeCe Klinger as a hard-drinking novelist bent on avenging past wrongs in Moonshot ( Steve Scott ditto ) ever rush their aberrant personae into creep-gothic caricature.
Finally, Sextet's three couples reveling in extramarital sexual fulfillment and Rill's gaggle of small-town teenagers on the brink of escape ( one not unlike Wilson himself ) , deliver clean, uncluttered spoken-word harmonies orchestrated, respectively, by Cecilie D. Keenan and Jeremy Wechsler.