Playwright: Phillip Hayes Dean
At: eta Square,
7558 S. South Chicago Ave.
Phone: (773) 752-3855; $25
Runs through: Dec. 29
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Every Night When the Sun Goes Down is set in a fictional 1960's American city at "the Square," a ghetto district where the party crowd gathers for Saturday night revels. This particular cold and windy night the crowds don't come, so the regulars at The Blue Room joust with one another, with club owner Clean Sam, and with Jerico the cop. Several of them live in the cheap hotel that adjoins the lounge. The wild card is Blood, returning this night a changed man after seven years in prison. What Blood brings to the Square is explosive in the era of "burn, baby, burn."
The play is built upon rich character writing and entertaining anecdotal scenes, rather than upon a strong story line. Author Phillip Hayes Dean gives us two hours to get to know his characters in detail, revealing their secrets and establishing the conflicts between them. Then, in the last few minutes, he overburdens the play with so much improbable incident that it induces unintended chuckles in the audience. Even more, Dean ends his play arbitrarily (I won't reveal how) rather than resolving the carefully established character conflicts.
The pleasure of the play, then, is in the telling rather than in the tale. And there is a good deal of pleasure in the eta Square production, thanks to a company of veteran performers under the guidance of an experienced director, Terry Cullers. He effectively follows the natural contours of the play, its high and low points, its slow and fast moments, its comedy and drama, allowing each actor to take center stage at the correct moment. The company almost pulls it off. They hold the often-rambling piece together for 90% of its length, but even these troupers can't make the lurid wind-up work.
Much of the production's effectiveness results from the strong personalities of the individual players, and Cullers' smart physical casting. There's the drop-dead comic timing of Daryl Charisse as Cockeyed Rose, the chiseled features and wavey hair of Vincent DeJan as blow-hard pimp Pretty Eddie, the shapely Carolyn Nelson as sensuous hooker Caldonia, the lythe-figured Makeba Ayo Pace as Blood's hurting wife, called Ballerina.
At the matrix are Ethan Henry as Clean Sam and Randolph Johnson (also a noted cabaret artist) as Blood. Both have rock-solid stage presence that bristles with expectation. It's not their fault that the author chooses not to develop the conflict between them that's at the core of the work. Willie B. Goodson as Jerico and Rich (single name) as Sneeky Pete are fine in less showy roles.
Dean's sometimes-poetic language brims with image and rhythm serving mood and characters well. Story-be-damned, it's speechifying that actors love, and this gang grabs it.
Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America
Playwright: Joan Holden
At: Naked Eye at Steppenwolf Upstairs
Phone: (312) 335-1650; $30-$35
Runs through: Nov. 30
BY RICK REED
Just a few years ago, magazine journalist Barbara Ehrenreich undertook what might have been her most challenging assignment. She left behind the trappings of her successful Manhattan lifestyle and went undercover to write a book about what life was like at the bottom of America's economic scale. Living only on the wages she would make as a chain restaurant waitress in Florida, an employee of a cleaning service in Maine, and a "Mall Mart" employee in Minnesota, Ehrenreich discovered a scandal, and something that the U.S., as one of the nation's wealthiest countries, should be deeply ashamed of. "Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health … can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high," Ehrenreich says.
Joan Holden took Ehrenreich's thesis and adapted it for the stage, getting across the indignities of working hard and still being unable to make ends meet. Peppered with tales of working people forced to live in vans, forced to work two jobs to barely make ends meet, people who would rather work injured than risk the ire of their employer, and a host of others, who should all be pictured in the dictionary next to the term, "downtrodden."
Naked Eye's production, directed by Jeremy B. Cohen, is crisp, taking all the elements of Ehrenreich's book and distilling them down into a stinging indictment of the American way, and how it may well be crumbling from the bottom up. As Barbara, Deborah Leydig is sympathetic, drawing us in with her warmth, wit, and the doubt the character experiences when it comes to things like exploitation and deception. Because of Leydig's heartfelt portrayal, we're right there with her, experiencing her doubts and her outrage.
Cohen has assembled a wickedly good ensemble of five to play an array of different parts. They all shine, and they're all able to differentiate each of their characters completely. Particularly good is Natalie West (probably best known for, and forever plagued with her TV identity: neighbor Crystal on Roseanne). West moves with seeming effortless between a dead-on-her-feet waitress in Florida, a rich bitch in Maine, and an evil little old lady in a nursing home. This is a mostly fine production, forcing you to think and appreciate what you have … because it's probably more than the millions of people in this country possess, who put in 40-plus hours a week and then still are uncertain whether they can afford food. Richard and Jacqueline Penrod's spare, two-tiered set is infinitely adaptable to a variety of settings, yet one wonders why the upper tier was utilized so little.
I highly recommend Nickel and Dimed. In spite of its grave subject matter, it's often funny, and Holden's script holds some thematic surprises. The best thing is how it gets inside your mind, making you question your own place in society and how you personally relate to the oppressed working class that continues to grow, but not to prosper.
