Playwright: George S. Kaufman and Howard Teichmann. At: Open Eye Productions at the. Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport. Phone: 773-935-6860; $20. Runs through: April 5. Photo by Paul Metreyeon.
Scholarly playgoers under 30 may want to consult a glossary before seeing this museum piece from 1953. After all, we are talking an era of dictaphones, typewriters ( manual, not electric ) , mimeograph machines and answering services, when advertisements for industrial materials—or just about anything, for that matter—featured scantily-clad bimbos, when a CEO salary of $175K was an outrageous sum, and newscasters smoked cigarettes on-camera. What requires no re-orientation, however, is the notion of corporate conglomerates being run by self-serving crooks.
The squad of greedheads on the board of General Products ( "If General Products doesn't make it, there's no money in it" ) are enjoying the benefits extended them by the company founder's absence after having been called to Washington. At their first stockholder's meeting, however, a middle-aged matron owning a petty 10 shares begins to question their decisions. Their solution is to hire her, at a starting wage of—gasp!—$400 a week, to oversee "stockholder relations"—a mythical post designed to keep her occupied and out of the way. But gradually, this humble citizen's enthusiasm, resourcefulness and down-home values land her not only a multi-millionaire boyfriend, but power beyond her most extravagant dreams.
This populist parable is presented by its authors as a modern-day fairy tale—a framing device fully justifying Open Eye Productions' loony-tunes approach to its text. But if the popularity of television's Mad Men, the latter set a decade after our play's period, make for some anachronisms—the length of the women's skirts, for one—Open Eye's replication of a world at once distant and familiar is sufficiently accurate to locate us while avoiding the distractions of gratuitous nostalgia. ( If your suspension of disbelief can handle a tycoon's assertion that his experience in the federal government taught him to be honest, you'll be fine. )
Maintaining the pace demanded of screwball comedy is no easy task; its challenge, in this case, is compounded by the reconfiguration of a three-act text to a cool one hour and 45 minutes ( with intermission ) . Director Chris Maher has assembled a cast adept at keeping character and traction at high speeds—among them, Sara Sevigny ( recently seen in the Hypocrites' roller-coaster Threepenny Opera ) playing the reluctant reformer, ably supported by Kevin Grubb as her enlightened capitalist swain, Neal Starbird as GP's chief slimeball and a delightfully acerbic Dean Peerman as our waspish storybook-wielding narrator.