Playwright: Rebecca Lenkiewicz . At: Vitalist Theatre at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont. Phone: 773-327-5252; $25-$20 seniors, students. Runs through: Oct. 17
If we had to pick a least-favorite stereotype from among the ( oh, so very ) many that litter the theatrical landscape , the adorable yet irascible/ wise yet kooky/fiercely independent yet childishly needy senior citizen would be near the top. You know this tired caricature: She's the cute-as-a-button oldster whose willful eccentricity is actually rich in warm-hearted wisdom. In this elder wise fool's headstrong ways are life lessons that the story's unhappily clueless younger folk could benefit from, if only they'd open their callow eyes to the radiant enlightenment grandma has to offerbefore it's too late.
To spend two-plus hours traffic on the stage with such a woman is to drown preciousness and twee. And that's precisely what defines Vitalist Theatre's Night Season. Directed by Elizabeth Carlin Metz, this is a rambling, sense-defying exercise in Emerald Isle sentiment and stereotype.
The dramaturgy explains that The Night Season is rooted in the turbulent romance between Maud Gonne and William Butler Yeatsnot that you'd discern that from watching the thing unfold on stage. Rebecca Lenkiewicz's messy, genre-spanning dramatic tragic-comedy plays more like an exercise for beginning thespians in Emoting 101. In a plot that lacks both lucid form and organic development, everybody on stage gets to indulge in major actorly moments, crying out in loneliness, laughing with wild abandon and/or stumbling drunkenly through an existential heartbreak or three.
All of which might be tolerable if the characters at hand were rooted in anything resembling authenticity. They are not and do not.
Amid a set inexplicably framed by doors stacked from floor to fly space, we meet three Irish sisters ( Hello Chekhov! ) , their drunken Irish Da ( who likes to quotewait for itKing Lear ) and the movie star shooting a film aboutbut of courseYeats.
The narrative sprawls like a jellyfish that can't quite control the direction of its ooze: By the time plucky, 70-going-on-six grandma ( costumed in preciously nonconformist layers of woolens ) starts waltzing on the beach ( and, of course, teaching the youngsters a thing or two about joie de vivre in the process ) , we'd long since stopped caring about any number of dead-end narrative threads. A prime reason not to care is the lack of narrative sense on display. Why, for example, does the movie star move in with the sisters for the length of his film shoot? Because the plot requires it, that's why. He sleeps with one sister. He stops sleeping with her. Fraught monologues ensue. And we should care, why?
In all, audiences would be better off renting Finian's Rainbow. At least that show doesn't pretend to be anything other than the treacle that it is.