Playwright: Harold Pinter
At: Steep Theatre, 3902 N. Sheridan Rd.
Phone: (312) 458-0772; $15
Runs through: Sept. 17
Watching The Hothouse, we get the uneasy feeling that we've seen parts of it before in other Pinter plays—No Man's Land, The Birthday Party, The Homecoming. And indeed, we might have, since two decades separate its composition from its premiere, with any amount of creative cannibalization possible in the course of its gestation.
Certainly there is little original in the setting—a mental hospital sponsored by the mysterious Ministry—or the personnel: Mr. Roote, the chief administrator, is an ultraconservative, possibly senile, commander. Gibbs, his secretary, is a small, quiet, subservient schemer. Lush, one of the wardens, is a large, boisterous, ambitious schemer. Other wardens include the guileless Lamb and the seductive Miss Cutts. The matter at hand concerns one patient who has died a week earlier and another who has given birth the night before to a child most likely fathered by one of the staff. So the task facing the institution's custodians on this Christmas Day is to find someone expendable to take the fall for these embarrassing oversights.
Christopher Rice's direction likewise inspires déjà vu in playgoers familiar with the academic mystique surrounding Pinter's enigmatic cosmos and its rules of discourse: the long silences, the cinematic blocking, the reduction of female characters to ambulatory vaginas invoking turmoil in male society. (A scene in which Gibbs and Cutts noisily get it off together in the observation booth while doling out therapeutic torture is a propagandistic cliché grown beyond shopworn.) But if some of the players in this Steep Theater Company production have not yet found their characters, their inertia is amply redeemed by the psychological interplay between Alex Gillmor's intense Gibbs and Peter Moore's oily Lush, and by Jim Poole's scenery-chomping portrayal of the smug Roote.
The Hothouse is currently running in repertory with Richard Dresser's Below The Belt (which, says Jonathan Abarbanel in last week's review for Windy City Times, 'exemplifies the risk-taking and surprise that the best Off-loop theater continues to offer' and features actors 'at the top of their game'). But if The Hothouse emerges as the lesser of the companion pieces, it shares nevertheless in the inauguration of a new home for one of Chicago's most promising young ensembles.