Playwright: Manny Tamayo. At: Factory Theater at Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston. Phone: 866-811-4111; $29
Runs through: Aug. 1. Photo by Paul Metreyeon
The first clue that the Factory Theater's modern murder mystery Dead Wrong might be a bad play is Manny Tamayo's billing of "Written and directed by."
That suspicion is amplified near the top when a limping teenage paperboy ( Brian Hinkle ) stars trumpeting murder-filled headlines by shouting "Extra! Extra!" as if it was 1909 instead of 2009.
Well, the kid says his selling technique is old school, so we'll forgive that anachronistic gaffe. But as we get introduced to more characters instead of any coherent storyline, it soon becomes apparent of how much Dead Wrong is becoming dead weight.
It's a good guess that with Dead Wrong, Tamayo was aiming to write a new film noir mystery ( with touches of bloody torture porn films ) . Tamayo aims to startle and alarm, but what he really needs is a good story editor to rein in all the tangential plot points and to help craft realistic motivations for the garish characters.
Tamayo does a capable job with the set-up as you follow shell-shocked Chicago police detective Mac ( Eric Thomas Roach ) trying to solve two concurrent mysteries. There's a missing teenage girl named Becky ( Corri Feuerstein ) and the murder of the wife of a creepy film director ( Zach Bloomfield ) .
You're curious to find out how it might turn out by intermission. But setup continues well into the second act, so that the ending becomes an incoherent rush to the finish line to tie up all the loose ends ( which Tamayo also fails to do ) .
Instead of explaining things, Tamayo throws out more keep-them-guessing tidbits by the rash of bizarre character motivations and activities involving snuff films, secret societies and organ harvesting. Don't be surprised if you start laughing, because the revelations defy reason.
Because everything Tamayo presented was so hard-boiled up to the climax, Dead Wrong fails as a deliberate spoof of the film noir genre. And because of the ending's wackiness, it fails as a credible neo-noir tribute.
At the very least, the actors throw themselves into their roles. Anderson Lawfer has fun as a paroled pedophile murderer living in fetid squalor, Allison Cain gets to vamp it up as a chanteuse/femme fatale and Anthony Tournis makes a credible corrupt Chicago cop.
But ultimately, you're watching actors in the midst of acting exercises involving shouting, stage fighting, stage blood and a myriad of noir stereotypes. Without a credible storyline or characters, Dead Wrong just becomes an atmospheric mishmash.
So if Factory Theater lavished all this effort on Tamayo's play because they thought it was an interesting neo-noir mystery, well then they were Dead Wrong. And if a billing of "written and directed by" hints at artistic genius, in this case it would be Dead Wrong.
