Playwright: Elmer Rice. At: National Pastime Theater at the Old Speakeasy, 4139 N. Broadway. Phone: 773-327-7077; $25. Runs through: April 25
As with many playwrights whose writing careers encompass a variety of structural forms—Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee—it's sometimes difficult to reconcile the Elmer Rice who wrote the still-shocking expressionist critique of corporate anonymity entitled The Adding Machine with the Elmer Rice who penned this starkly naturalistic 1929 panorama of urban-slum culture. National Pastime Theater, however, proposes to bridge the gulf between the two in this highly original interpretation of the landmark American drama.
Scenic designer David Denman's crumbling tenement within the Old Speakeasy's period-authentic storefront immediately locates us in an age before tidy municipal low-cost housing projects. Instead, we are confronted with a sweltering warren of immigrants where everyone knows his or her neighbors' business, where casual ethnic slurs belie the necessary veneer of tolerance and where the universal quest is that of respite from their meager existence—by whatever means available. Its inhabitants are Ashcan School archetypes grown familiar—all right, hackneyed—over time: the bellicose Irish laborer and his meek put-upon wife, an elderly Marxist and his devoted schoolmarm daughter, a effusive Italian couple, young mothers and fathers, nuns, tradesmen, assorted bullies, lowlives and thrill-seekers—oh, and the obligatory boy and girl dreaming of escape to a better life.
Rice's play, then, is less a character study than a sociological treatise describing a world rarely seen by the affluent citizens who attended the theatre in his time. Co-directors Laurence Bryan and Keely Haddad-Null, however, impose an additional dimension on the surface action, lending form to the unseen forces that propel the action—specifically, the creeping despair that cripples the human spirit, leaving innocents with complexions Edward Gorey-pale and physical mobility orchestrated until they merge into one great monstrous beast.
In lesser hands, these enigmatic manifestations could easily disintegrate into chaos—and there's no denying the few minutes required to acclimate to our concept—but the razor-sharp stylistic demarcations, both in terms of performance and technical effects, evidenced on its opening night quickly draw us into our surrealistically squalid universe. And while taxonomic guardians may object to this cross-genre experimentation, audiences willing to suspend their academic prejudices will discover in this fresh take on the venerable classroom classic an intriguing subtext to the face of poverty, heightening our awareness of its erosive roots. Indeed, if you look about you after you leave the theater, you might, yourself, catch a glimpse of shadowy phantoms lurking in the Broadway landscape.
