Playwright: Sean Graney
At: The Side Project, 1520 W. Jarvis
Phone: ( 773 ) 973-2150; $10
Runs through: May 31
Playwright Sean Graney ( director of many Hypocrites projects ) takes an interesting tack by modeling his world premiere play after the puppet theater of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who, in 1703, wrote The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, about a doomed romance between a shop clerk and a courtesan. Monzaemon ushered in a new kind of theater with this work, bringing intricate puppetry into the world of the domestic drama, called sewa-mono.
The parallels between Monzaemon's work and Graney's are two fold. First, Monzaemon used real life as the basis for his tragedy, taking it from Japanese headlines of the time about the double suicide of the clerk and courtesan. Graney, too, uses contemporary-based news to provide a backdrop for his piece. Who hasn't heard about childhood and adolescent angst, cruelty, and alienation erupting into mortal violence?
Second, Graney, by making his story the object of a fourth-grade pageant, albeit one you pray you'll never see, sets it down in the perfect milieu, with its casual cruelty and self doubt that exist most powerfully in this childhood microcosm.
Graney lets us hear his tale in a brisk 45 minutes, narrated by Johnny, the already dead narrator. The story, about a bullied girl and boy and how childhood's unparalleled cruelty leads toward catastrophic tragedy, is simple, yet underpinned with a much more complex thesis. As we witness the domino effect of teasing, revenge, and low self esteem that might be found in any elementary school, we realize that Graney is working on larger themes, about paradoxes of human interaction and humanity, and the futility of revenge. These themes exist within us all, but fourth graders exhibit these traits most acutely.
And the septet that portrays this little cabal of childhood is acute in their depictions. Although the playwright says he wanted the production to be done by children, these adults deftly bring childhood to disturbing, and credible life. Other than the hall monitor's speech impediment, which is pointless and only makes her sound like Elmer Fudd, there are some fine performances here, most notably those of Jon Krajecki as Johnny and Samantha Gleisten and Anna Weiler, who portray his tormentors with a firm finger on the pulse of childhood.
All that said, this is a far from perfect production. For one, the playwright lapses into pretense, letting his 'children' lapse into monologues that explain too much and allowing them to speak beyond their years. Graney avoided the hard work here and should have showed us the context of these monologues through the children's interaction. But Jimmy McDermott's direction is spare, and although he and the playwright take us into a nightmarish land, it still rings true.
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