Playwright: Craig Wright
At: Steppenwolf Garage Theatre
Phone: (312) 335-1650; $12
Runs through: Nov. 23
It's difficult for critics to convey the essence of good acting. Theater is such a 'you-had-to-be-there' experience, that the best we can do is to describe good performances as crisp or intense or focused or riveting or unmannered or explosive or energized, or say that an actor lived in the moment or conveyed it all with his eyes or body language or played the subtext. Well, the four performers in Orange Flower Water are all those things, and do all those things, in spades. Darrell W. Cox, Molly Glynn, Whitney Sneed and Christian Stolte all are local younger actors we've seen do good work before, but never like this. Under actor-turned-director Rick Snyder, they truly enlarge themselves in a power demonstration of why Chicago remains America's best acting town.
The story is nothing—two thirtysomething, small-town couples come unglued when a long-brewing affair finally is consummated—but the telling is everything in the hyper-naturalistic script by former Minnesotan Craig Wright. In a brief (75 minutes) series of two-person scenes, video store owner Brad Youngquist figures out his wife, Beth, is having an affair with pharmacist David Calhoun, and calls her on it. He also call's David's wife, Cathy. Forced into the open, David and Beth start a life together consumed by guilt and second guessing, especially David, but with Beth already pregnant.
Wright's skillful dialogue avoids melodrama and provides psychological depth seemingly despite its realism. However, it could be acted in a strikingly different way if the dialogue was delivered more carefully, without overlaps or the rapid dynamic shifts of emotional outbursts. But Snyder goes for overlaps and boisterous dynamics to achieve the spontaneity of anger, pain and wheedling. The technical challenge is greater but so is the truthful essence. In a production as intimate as this one—and as torrid—with actors and audience close upon each other in the Steppenwolf Garage Theatre, truthfulness is all.
The quiet pharmacist, David, is the work's fulcrum, crotch-driven but guilt-stricken and doomed to hurt the ones he loves. Darrel W. Cox plays him as a fallen little-boy-lost working up a sweat—literally—as a sexual stallion. Christian Stolte has the bravura role as the explosively foul-mouthed Brad, his self-centered swagger reduced to a confession of need and love that comes too late. The women's roles are less colorful but no less apt. Molly Glynn is Cathy Calhoun, the efficient wife, mother and teacher who runs the household and sends her husband packing with an abject demonstration of his weakness. Whitney Sneed is Beth, of frightened and hopeful eyes, the most passive of the four characters and the dreamer who never will escape a mundane reality.
Orange Flower Water tells us life doesn't get better, it just gets different.