Playwright: Paul Peditto
At: Live Bait Theatre, 3914 N. Clark
Phone: (773) 871-1212; $10
Runs through: June 21
We enter Live Bait Theater's Bucket space to confront an imposing ocean-colored collage, whose components include a stuffed swordfish covered in glitter, naked Barbies dangling from the ceiling, a row of gilded comefuckme pumps, a cluster of religious icons, and bunches of blatantly artificial tropical kitsch. But amid the Cornell-box serenity of this diorama, rendered all the more tranquil by the mesmerizing score of incidental music, is chalked graffiti hinting at sinister turbulence beneath its deceptively placid surface.
Likewise alien is our hero, a former Casino-boat drone who strikes it rich in the stock market—easy to do in 1999. He emigrates to Costa Rica where, under the nom de expatrié of Pauly Vegas, he enjoys the privilege afforded by Third World countries to rich greedhead gringos. But while you can lead an honest midwestern boy to beaches, babes and la Pura Vida, you can't make him drink deeply from 'that great vagina of life' for long. After his initial immersion into the world of amoral indulgence, the squalor endured by the citizens who serve him with slavish devotion awaken in him the guilty compassion that we Americans can't seem to escape.
How autobiographical is Paul Peditto's safari into the Heart Of Darkness? Certainly, Vegas shares characteristics with his creator—depreciating assessments of his own physical attractions, the introspective acuity to argue the evils of denial over those of indulgence, and an aesthetic mandating the portrayal of gritty cruelties through the superfine sand of metaphor. A drug dealer, for example, is envisioned as a literal Candy Man, his case overflowing with Milky Ways and Butterfingers. Viagra-enhanced sex is replicated by the ingestor lying supine, legs twitching as if in galvanic shock. And the teenage prostitute with whom our naive extranjero inevitably falls in love is represented by a virginal blue scarf draped gracefully over his bedside lamp.
Peditto's saga of Fear And Loathing In Margaritaville, as recounted by author-lookalike Eric Zeigenhagen under the direction of the redoubtable Beau O'Reilly, stumbled from time to time on its own momentum at its final preview. But ultimately, its allegory of folly and redemption speaks with universal voice to pilgrims progressing in an increasingly uncertain—economically, anyway—universe toward a mythic earthly paradise.