Playwright: Will Eno. At: Black Sheep Productions at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport. Phone: 773-935-6860; $20. Runs through: May 31
We are told in the course of the evening that our play was called The Snow Romance before the author changed the title to The Flu Season. In fact, we are told a lot of things about the story set in a—yawn!—mental hospital where the staff members chatter on about themselves and allow the patients to roam the grounds unsupervised, where one of the latter engages in sex, gets pregnant, has an abortion and commits suicide. Theatergoers should not feel cheated, however, since the progress of the sweethearts ( identified only as "Man" and "Woman" ) is of no more consequence than the sample sentences provided in Grammar And Composition schoolbooks.
Writing plays is so much fun, you see, that sooner or later, every scribbler who has read Pirandello ( or Cliff's Notes thereof ) decides to share the experience with his/her audience. Will Eno accomplishes this goal through the introduction of two chorus boys ( the tragic Greek, not the musical-comedy, kind ) dubbed "Prologue" and "Epilogue," who interrupt the action of the show-formerly-known-as Snow Romance with redundant stage directions, location images, and the playwright's commentary. Since Prologue is nurturing, while Epilogue is candid, a dialectic—ooooh!—is set up between the gently optimistic and coldly rational narrative modes. Isn't this thrilling?
Eno's simultaneous semantic analyses will likely draw guffaws from attendant wordsmiths ( like me ) , but what will keep everybody else in their seats for the two hours that it takes him to exhaust his topic is the dream-team cast assembled by director Jeremy Wechsler. Not only are the six players uniformly well-versed in maintaining straight faces while uttering premium-grade drivel, but they attack their patently artificial text with a gleeful relish so infectious that we come to enjoy the sheer artistry of their industry, just as we are convinced they do.
Leading the revels are Cory Krebsbach and John Henry Roberts as Prologue and Epilogue, respectively, whose command of their dryly literary domain never flags, even when it mandates scaling a Fourth Wall barricading, on the night I attended, only a bare handful of fellow travelers. William J. Watt and Darrelyn Marx's Doctor and Nurse likewise acquit themselves with affable aplomb, as do Alice Wedoff and Matt Holzfeind as the lovers forced to speak in a rambling, vaguely John Ashbery, poetic idiom. Together, they make this stroll through the inside of Eno's skull sufficiently entertaining to wish Black Sheep Productions better material for its next project.
