Playwright: Richard Dresser
At: Steep Theatre, 3902 N. Sheridan
Phone: (312) 458-0722; $15
Runs through: Sept. 13
Below the Belt makes a good partner for Harold Pinter's The Hot House (to be reviewed next week), with which it's sharing the Steep stage. As in the work of Pinter, Richard Dresser's 1995 comedy of menace owes a good deal to European absurdism of an earlier decade, as it explores issues of territoriality and power. Dresser seems knowingly to echo the older and more masterful Pinter in Below the Belt, in which an oppressive, nameless and faceless society creates a pall of paranoia among three men, who nonetheless jockey for dominance among themselves.
Dresser's setting is a monolithic industrial complex, isolated in a desert slowly being poisoned by the complex's waste. Here, middle-aged, low-middle-management Merkin supervises the Checkers, the despised employees whose job is to check the work of the manufacturing lines. But Merkin's department consists of only two men who, like him, have signed their lives away to long terms of industrial confinement, leaving wives and families far behind. Merkin's only power and pleasure is in manipulating long-time employee Hanrahan and the new Checker, Dobbitt. In addition to the artificiality of the basic situation—a parody of corporate culture—the absurdist influence is apparent in verbal banter based largely on false syllogism, in which the most blatant asininity goes unchallenged.
Under director Dana Friedman, the three Steep actors are on top of the game (despite being young for their roles). Laurens Wilson is creepy as the oddly sponge-like yet blandly vicious Merkin, his thinning hair greased down. Steep company member Brendan Melanson makes a shining-faced Dobbitt, a dedicated and seemingly naïve younger company man. Matt Carter is Hanrahan, the hero of the play with the most at stake. All three are verbally dexterous, and neatly contrast each other physically and in temperament. But it is Carter who is first among equals, providing the play's knife edge with his lean and hungry look and hostile attitude.
Scenic designer John Wilson squeezes a helluva' lot onto the postage stamp Steep stage, a typical storefront. Using two platforms and a touch of miniaturization, he provides three distinct playing areas including Merkin's office, the bunk bed dorm Dobbitt and Hanrahan share, and the poisonously orange desert outdoors. Director Friedman sees to it that the players never are on top of each other, and even choreographs an effective razor fight in Act I and an unexpected Fred-and-Ginger type dance number in Act II.
In bringing to the stage an unfamiliar work by a relatively unfamiliar author (Dresser's Rounding Third was done at Northlight Theatre last year), and one full of physical and thematic challenges at that, Steep exemplifies the risk-taking and surprise that the best Off-Loop theater continues to offer.