Playwright: Carrie Barrett. At: Sideshow Theatre Company at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave. Tickets: www.sideshowtheatre.org; $20. Runs through: Aug. 4
I'm not sure if the heavy bags under the eyes of actress Karie Miller are applied with makeup or appear naturally on their own. Either way, they're one of the first tell-tale signs that you're dealing with a woman who is burdened with overwhelming worries in Sideshow Theatre Company's world premiere of Carrie Barrett's play The Burden of Not Having a Tail.
From the moment you enter the auditorium, you're clued into the paranoid neurosis of Barrett's unnamed Woman (Miller), a self-described "prepper" who is gladly offering her personal tips on how to prepare to survive the next inevitable global pandemic. Set designer Eleanor Kahn has sheathed the Chicago Dramatists space with protective plastic, while the sound design work of Michael Huey and Christopher M. LaPorte hint of the extreme germ-o-phobe warnings that will follow in the play proper.
Sure enough, Miller's Woman is soon bemoaning her bulk purchase of scented lotions since she just read a piece on how they're actually bad for you. And that's not the loopiest of advice that Miller's Woman shares.
The Woman goes on to share her obsessions with bulk buying discounts and bemoaning mankind's evolution so that we no longer have protruding tails to give us all a better sense of animalistic instinct.
On one level, playwright Barrett and actress Miller want you to laugh at the wackiness of their leading lady in the show. But they also reveal snippets of what drove this poor woman to be so suspicious and mistrusting in what life has dealt her—showing what an emotional and personal mess her life has become, despite the initial tidiness of her underground bunker surroundings.
Alas, this mixture of mockery and sympathy doesn't fully gel in either Barrett's writing or in Miller's amiable, but not quite commanding enough performance. And though director Megan A. Smith works extremely well with set designer Kahn to visually checklist the way this Woman's life and obsessions have tumbled into so much desperation and disorder, it's not quite enough to carry you through the main character's rambling monologue of a show.
Besides, would the Woman, who is so obsessed with germs, be willing to spend so much time with strangers in the audience if she can't guarantee if we've all gone through some sort of sanitized rinse? The Burden of Not Having a Tail has plenty of ideas and drama to share, but it all comes off as too much of a jumbled mess to emotionally carry you through to the unhappy end.
