Playwright: Adam Bock . At: About Face Theatre at Stage Left Theatre, 3408 N. Sheffield . Phone: 866-811-4111; $20. Runs through: Nov. 7
The Flowers is deceptive. It initially seems almost trifling as it meanders through the everyday tribulations of the titular Chicago-based theater company, an unremarkable troupe held together in the grand off-Loop tradition of sealing wax, spit and artistic passion.
Bock's plot moves with the messy arc of day-to-day life: Heartbreak and death don't arrive with orchestral swells at structurally appropriate climactic moments; they simply show up. And then life goes relentlessly on.
Yet within Bock's seemingly specific story lies a moving portrait of everyman and woman struggling with universal matters. The cruelties of aging, the search for community, the oh-so-human tendency to deal with pain by denying its very existenceall are matters plumbed with engrossing humanity and effortless ease by a seamless ensemble. And for all its fraught issues, The Flowers is no onerous slog. The piece is cuttingly funny.
Initially, The Flowers plays like a poor man's Tom Stoppard, evoking The Real Thing as actors playing actors perform a show within a show. But Bock's drama isn't about clever tricks. It is about revelations layered like the tiers of an onion. Directed by Trip Cullman, the cast peels things down to their essence with a truly wonderful collective chemistry. The group perfectly captures the rhythms of spontaneous conversation and familiarity among people who have been friends for so long they've become family. Like all families, this one is troubled, more so than the group's de facto artistic director ( Bruch Reed ) is willing to admit.
Even when his partner of 10 years ( a mercurial Benjamin Sprunger ) bolts with the ingénue ( Kieran Kredell, as fecklessly self-absorbed as you'd expect a twentysomething actor to be ) , even as the company's patriarch ( Brian-Mark Conover, alternately irascible and poignant ) tumbles into senility and becomes a tragic stranger in his own life, Flowers' leader implacably insists that all is shiny and happy. As the hairpin cracks in that implacability widen into fissures, the remains of the company implodes with wrenching emotional honesty. A hilariously, abrasively enthusiastic leading lady ( Caron Buinis, pitch-perfect depicting the neediness of someone who seeks audience approval for a living ) and a drolly matter-of-fact stage manager ( Merrina Millsapp, a wryly no-nonsense sparrow in a room full of peacocks ) are left to pick up the pieces and help their artistic director mend.
The hurt and the humor unfolds on Marianna Csaszar's ingenious set, a place that literally deepens and unfolds in tandem with the drama.
Trust The Flowers to lesser actor, and the final moment could be an inconclusive cop-out. It's wordless and abrupt: After a violent heartbreak, the world goes still. Here, in that stillness is Reed, his face a perfect reflection of endlessly multifaceted pain, fear and something else, too: the sustaining fortitude that comes from dealing with devastation. It's Reed's momentquiet and indelible and wondrously moving.