Playwright: adapted by Isaiah Robinson from the poem by Joseph Moncure March. At: Silent Theatre Company at Prop Thtr, 3504 N. Elston. Phone: 773-544-1749; $15. Runs through: Oct. 2
One steamy summer night, two small-time vaudeville entertainers dwelling in the city's bohemian quarter during the Jazz Agethe "sexually ambitious" Queenie and her ill-tempered paramour, Burrsdecide to have a party. Their guests are the people we expect to find at such events, doing the sort of thing such people do, until tragedy strikes, as it invariably does in parables of this kind.
In another age, this romanticized portrait of tawdry "fast-life" fringe society would have been circulated on broadsides, titled something along the lines of "A Sadde Tayle of Jealousie." In our own century, it has inspired two musicals, a movie and countless popular songs. But what led Joseph Moncure March's ballad-length poem to be banned in several cities upon its publication in 1928 was its explicit descriptions of its lurid milieu: An "ambisextrous" soft-shoe dancer, say, or the femme fatale whom, "Women adored her/Less often, a man/and the more fool, he/She was Les-bi-an." And don't forget our author's blatant announcement of the moment when "the party began to reek of sex."
For this multidiscipline performance piece, the Silent Theatre Company departs from the early cinema reproduction that is its stock-in-trade. Instead, Isaiah Robinson recites Moncure's rhyming couplets, voicing both omniscient narrator and all speaking characters, while accompanying himself on piano from a corner of the stage. As he does soplayfully breaking with text on occasion to remind us, for example, that "gay" Mae is "not ho-mo-sexual gay, but 1920s gay, which meant she was happy!"the actors parade the various characters in vivid detail, replete with a visual sensuality that lends the requisite sweat to such observations as "Some love is fire/Some is rust/But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust."
Lindsay Marks ( aka Lady Jack ) delivers a charming and charismatic performance as the statuesque Queeniebesides directing her fellow players in some razzle-dazzle hoofingwhile Dan Howard embodies a suitably smoldering Burrs and Bryson Engelen acquits himself admirably as the slumming rich boy whose chivalry determines their fates. But it's the company's ensemble execution, with every aspect and every actor firmly focused in the scenewhether tangled in a writhing orgiastic knot on a studio couch, or cheering on a bout of fisticuffsthat upon the evening's conclusion, awakens ( almost immediately ) a desire to experience the whole 90 minutes a second time.