Playwrights: Barbara Wallace and Thomas R. Wolfe
At: Famous Door at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont
Phone: (773) 327-5252; $16-$32
Runs through: Nov. 9
There are many things to recommend Famous Door's second installment to their Early and Often trilogy. For a story set in LBJ-era Chicago revolving around a fight over who will provide folding chairs for a Catholic church bazaar, it packs great entertainment value. But the more amazing thing is that this tightly written, deftly staged, and impressively performed vehicle also possesses a fairly dark and bittersweet thesis. Playwrights Wallace and Wolfe know how to craft a shrewd entertainment that also has the audacity to be about something significant: small people with big dreams and the deflating truth that we can see and that they can't: they'll never achieve them.
This smallness hits you as the play opens with an argument between Father Mike (Michael Bertrando) and folding chairs vendor Ed Talley (John Gawlik). Small? The argument that forms the core conflict of the play is over folding chairs. Small? Talley likes to puff his small self up by using lots of ten-dollar words; problem is, he doesn't know the meaning of them. The theme continues as this funny, often biting, story unfolds. John Flannery (Will Casey) is a North Side councilman with a secret that only Talley knows, and he forces Flannery to use his miniscule political clout to strong arm Father Mike into seeing things his way. Flannery's wife Jeannie (Jen Engstrom) provides the funniest—and most pathetic—portrait in the play. Hungry for power, she trumps up a possibly imaginary, but very distant, family tie with Joan Kennedy. This tie prompts her to write Ted Kennedy's wife to see if she can get her husband a job in Washington. She parlays this letter (and its probably form reply) into being one of the Kennedy clan (one of the most hilarious moments of the play comes when she enters, fresh from a memorial mass for JFK, dressed entirely in black, complete with veil). And then there's Dennis and Anne Marie O'Malley (Daniel Rivkin and Kate Martin), close relatives of the Flannerys and jealous of their power and now, newfound, alliance with the Kennedys. Kate Martin's portrayal of Anne Marie is one of the best, and funniest, of the whole ensemble. Bitter, and at the same time devout and naïve, Martin's portrayal is a small wonder (she calls the Virgin Mary 'a piece of work' and describes a nun for whom she does volunteer work this way: 'I can see why she wanted to be a Bride of Christ, but why He said yes, I'll never know). It is Anne Marie's speech that closes the play. In it, she talks about writing to Joan Kennedy herself and how the anticipation of waiting for a reply leaves her 'tingly' and how she hopes a reply never comes, because these days are the best of life. She perfectly sums up the sad realization that the big dreams occupying all these characters probably is nothing more than fool's gold. It helps that Martin underplays the speech and thus delivers it perfectly.
Aside from a good script, the play inhabits its 1964 Chicago setting perfectly. The music, set, and costumes all conspire to create the time period flawlessly. And The Great Society, in its own small way, is a pretty flawless outing itself.
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