Playwright: adapted by Maggie Speer
from stories by Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler
At: Azusa Productions at the
North Lakeside Cultural Center, 6219 N. Sheridan
Phone: 312-409-4207; $12
Runs through: April 27
Raymond Chandler's 1936 short story entitled The Man Who Liked Dogs is a pulp-fiction classic, packing into a mere 20 pages an epic myth involving a hard-drinking detective hero, crooked small-town cops, a bank robber with a code of honor, a jaded woman willing to die for her man, a seamy sanitarium, a heavily-guarded offshore casino, several fatal shootouts and a large ferocious canine. Ah, but its laconic first-person narrator recounts his adventures in such florid diction as 'I was shot so full of hop, I could have been Rockefeller's pet dime trying to spin myself' or 'He shut his mouth with all the deliberation of a steam shovel'. And don't forget the machine gun fracas where, 'The cop in nurse's uniform turned as white as his starched cap. Pieces of wood and plaster flew like fists at an Irish wedding. Four round patches of red appeared in a diagonal line across the uniform, chest-high.'
The action-oriented Azusa Productions company could hardly be expected to resist this testosterone-perfumed poetry for long—but how does a low-budget company recreate the extensive scenic effects mandated by Chandler's luridly atmospheric text? Cinematic adaptations skirted the problem by keeping the lights low and camera range restricted—inadvertently spawning a stylistic genre later dubbed 'film noir'—but Azusa director Maggie Speer goes a step further by eliminating the technical demands altogether, instead seating her 11 actors in a tidy row of chairs with scripts in hand, and letting Chandler's evocative prose works its magic unobstructed.
Seasoned playgoers recognize this manner of presentation as what is known as 'concert reading,' associated most closely in this region with the ShawChicago ensemble. The company assembled for this program of two plays running in repertory ( The Man Who Liked Dogs alternates with Dashiell Hammett's Flypaper ) , anchored by Steve Hickson as the 'shamus from the big town,' were still a trifle hesitant on their cues at the opening performance. But the interaction should soon be sufficiently tightened to highlight the precision timing necessitated by sentences split among multiple voices, making for an intimate entertainment to please verbally adept theatergoers.
