Playwright: Brenda Kilianski.
At: Stockyards Theatre Project
at the North Lakeside.
Cultural Center, 6219 N. Sheridan.
Phone: 773-936-7896; $10-$15.
Runs through: April 25.
As the curtain rises, we discover a middle-aged woman, recently released from prison after completing a sentence for her dissident activities in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, being held captive in a snowbound cabin by the child of an innocent victim killed in the violence perpetrated by the matronly ex-con long ago. In dramatic terms, this means we have a grown-up daughter, angry at having lost her mother, and a past-her-prime mother, regretful over her own daughter's estrangement. Neither of them can leave. Now, what does the latter do to defuse a potentially volatile situation?
Playwright Brenda Kilianski's solution is as textbook-predictable as her premise: after reciting a few obligatory retro-platitudes, Lydia proceeds to cajole the hostile Nancy with good-mommy overtures. Her warder resists just long enough to extend the conflicts to appropriate feature-length playing time, whereupon both embrace in tearful remorse for lives shattered by lofty intentions and fickle circumstances.
What indelibly labels Kilianski's soapy duet as classroom exercise, however, is not the two-way Stockholm Syndrome dynamic at work from the first moments, nor even the occasional anachronism ( did teenagers still play their records on the 'hi-fi' in 1974? Or self-styled white rebels boast of their 'street cred'? ) , but the smug tidiness of its dialogue, as when Lydia protests, 'I'm not the monster you hoped to see!', to which her antagonist swiftly ripostes, 'You're not the savior you hoped I'd see!'. We are told that Nancy has only a community-college education, and that Lydia earned a jailhouse degree in law ( what? Not psychology? ) , but their discourse is that of doctoral students in English Lit.
Iris Lieberman and Jenn SavaRyan struggle mightily to lend human dimension to the stereotypes they are forced to occupy ( see if you recognize the face in the 'wanted' poster on the playbill cover ) . Their success might have compensated for the shallowness of their material, if Kilianski's artificial construct could have illuminated some greater abstract issue. But in 2008, nearly a half-century after the fact, does it come as a surprise that the counterculture wasn't as unified as its promulgators claimed? Or that idealistic maidens entranced by 'the movement' were duped into subordinate roles? 'The media is responsible for a lot of mythologizing of the 60s' sighs Lydia at one point. Kilianski's goal may have been to refute the romantic nostalgia surrounding that turbulent period in American history, but ultimately Free Radicals only serves to promote them.
