Playwright: David Auburn
At: Piven Theatre, 927 Noyes, Evanston
Phone: (847) 866-8049; $25
Runs through: Nov. 23
Before David Auburn became a hot young playwright with Proof (winner of both the Tony and the Pulitzer) he penned Skyscraper. One has to wonder if Skyscraper (from 1997) would have been trotted out now if it weren't for the playwright's latter-day success. And further, one wonders about the wisdom of dredging up earlier artistic works by writers who have blossomed into truly original voices. Alas, Skyscraper is the kind of work that shows boundless promise, but also demonstrates the earmarks of someone learning his craft: the worst of these being pretentiousness, archetypical characters, and dialogue that veers between very believable and natural to artlessly affected.
Skyscraper is the story of five Chicagoans who meet in the play's prologue on a rainy urban street. There's Louis (Larry Wiley) a 110-year-old man who, as we discover, has a real link to Chicago's architectural history, and particularly that of its first skyscraper. Vivian (Gita Tanner, in a hammy performance that should have been tamped down by director Scott Shallenbarger) is a woman in period clothes bent on suicide (she's also, it turns out, a kind of ghost when she's not busy being a metaphor for the evils of progress). Joseph (Jeremy Glickstein in one of the more solid, restrained performances in this outing) and Raymond (Aaron Christensen) are brothers at odds. Raymond is a too-busy yuppie executive in charge of the demolition of the landmark building around which the play revolves; Joseph is his hapless younger sibling with an affinity for the past. Jessica lives for a mission: documenting old architecture with her camera, so these places of often mesmerizing, decrepit beauty are not lost to the march of time. Finally, we have attorney Jane (Marcia Reinhard), who's working with Jessica to stop the demolition, but is hampered by her promiscuity.
Auburn does a good job linking these characters and successfully merging them into a cohesive piece, which makes for a good story, but a bit of an obvious statement about our times and how modern progress is not always a good thing. The play isn't bad … it isn't great either. It's a mediocre effort by a skilled artist who hasn't yet lived up to his potential. The staging of the show by director Shallenbarger is a bit uneven, too strident in places, and slow in others. His ensemble could have benefited from a firmer hand. The performances here range from pretty impressive to pretty bad.
Is Skyscraper worth getting out to see? In a smaller town, without the choices Chicago offers, the answer would be yes, for its ideas and compelling story. But here, with a mind-boggling array of theatrical options, it's just not good enough to warrant the expenditure of time and money.