Playwright: John Kolvenbach at: Route 66 Theatre Company at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse, 2257 n. Lincoln Phone: 773-871-3000; $25 Runs through: Sept. 6. Photo courtesy of Katharine hughes
Sub-Sam Shepard-lite or poor man's Mamet? You could take your pick to describe John Kolvenbach's On An Average Day. A two-hander getting a far better production than it deserves from the Route 66 Theatre Company, the piece boasts a pair of brutally authentic performances from Stef Tovar and Johnny Clark. Unfortunately, the mostly superior performances can't justify a script that substitutes coherence and context with fisticuffs and more impassioned, nonsequiturial monologues than an Equity general audition.
The drama begins with the odd, foreboding reunion of long-estranged siblings Jack ( Tovar ) and his little brother, Bobby ( Clark ) . Bobby is holed up in the filth-encrusted kitchen of the home where the boys grew up. Immediately, it becomes clear that Bobby is crippled by severe illness. He's schizophrenic, besieged by voices and visions; is obsessive/compulsive as he hoards news clippings about unidentified bodies ( 'In case one of them turns out to be me' ) ; and is sociopathic in his ability inflict harm without remorse and profoundly depressed in his willingness to live in abject squalor.
Clark gives a disturbingly accurate portrayal of mental illness—this is the haunted, tragic face of a thousand of uninsured street people and forgotten inmates warehoused in the modernday bedlams of state-run psychiatric wards. Pacing across a linoleum floor rotting under decades of accumulated crud, Bobby's eyes dart and his limbs twitch like a starving rat skittering over a garbage dump, He seems the polar opposite of older brother Jack. The latter arrives in a neat brown sweater vest, pressed khakis and hair slicked into place with a razor-straight side part, the very portrait of tidy normalcy. And as Jack takes in Bobby's living conditions with gagging horror, so does the audience, thanks to Danny Cistone's perfect ( and perfectly awful ) set. One glimpse at this claustrophobic environment and you'll crave a long shower in strong disinfectant. Dirty dishes scabbed over with ancient food fill the sink; windows are mold-brown with grime, wallpaper peels back to reveal dark spaces surely festering with legions of vermin. If Cistone's work doesn't set off your gag reflex, you're just not paying attention.
Would that the nightmares pursuing Jack and Bobby were as effectively drawn. Instead, Kolvenbach gives us extreme dysfunction minus a context that can instill it with humanity. Through stilted exposition, we get only scattered, disjointed images of the boys' troubled upbringing. Imagine seeing sporadic, single-frames from a horror movie flash by out of order—the images might be compelling, but as a story, they make no sense and feel more like a pretentious exercise in evoking unearned emotion than an honest attempt at providing the audience with a compelling narrative. When Jack finally makes the big reveal about his own wife and children, the moment feels both laughably bloated with manufactured angst and utterly unimportant.