Playwright: Liza Lentini. At: Rubicon Theatre Project at Stage Left, 3408 N. Sheffield. Phone: 773-466-1835; $10-$20. Runs through: Dec. 5
"Write what you know" is good advice to beginners, but it can be a double-edged sword. So says playwright Liza Lentini, who proceeds to prove it, along with the adage regarding the distinction between amateur and professional lying in the latter's ability to do the job even when not in the mood.
Ingrid—no surname—is the celebrated American author of a book documenting in minute detail her own confrontation with a tragedy in her life. Her confessional earns itself a four-year stint on the best-seller lists, but the follow-up to this cri de coeur is less well-received ( her agent suggests something "lighter" next time ) . In an attempt to rekindle the fires of inspiration, she now lives in a remote corner of Scotland, where she passes the time—measured in days of rain and hours of sunshine—teaching at the local university, cuddling with a grant-financed boho artist and discarding the evidence of her writers' block. Unknown to her, however, a young matron likewise seeking her muse is about to commandeer the distraught wordsmith as her personal mentor.
Becoming Ingrid could have been a snide commentary on the literary cult of Self-Absorption. Or a coming-of-age story recounting a starry-eyed fan's discovery that her idol has clay feet. At its most extreme, it could have emerged an obsessed-stalker thriller, à la Stephen King. Lentini takes none of these well-worn paths, instead leading her two protagonists to enlightenment by way of the title character's awakening sense of responsibility toward her unwanted disciple—who utters fatuities like "a writer's lover is her words"—eager to sacrifice earthly joys upon the Byronic altar of romantic melancholy.
The Rubicon Theatre Project deftly sidesteps their material's potential mawkishness, weighing artistic subjectivity against affected egocentricity with unjudgmental candor. Katie Schweiger's collage-like scenic design in the stark confines of Stage Left's black-box studio likewise walks the line between thematic illumination and parody. Meg Harkins makes a charmingly ingenuous mythologizer, while April Fletcher delivers a mature and irony-free performance as the object of her admiration, flanked by Heidi Katz, Billy Fenderson, Jessica Thigpen and Jeff Taylor playing an assortment of aesthetes and philistines immediately identifiable to their practicing real-life counterparts.
