Playwrights: Chance Bone and Andrew Burden Swanson. At: Jackalope Theatre Company at Storefront Theater, 66 E. Randolph St. Tickets: 1-773-340-2543; www.jackalopetheatre.org; $15. Runs through: July 28
You need to have a reason to set a play in a particular time and place. It's swell if the playwright, director and cast understand the reason, but if the audience doesn't understand then the play has failed. That's a problem with The Casuals. There's no inherent reason why it's set in mid-1950s Nevada, when the United States was testing nuclear weapons in the desert.
In fact, The Casuals doesn't even identify the era. Apart from vague references to "The War," meaning WWII, there's not a single time or date reference in the play; no mention of current events, popular songs or TV shows; no names of political, sports or entertainment personalities to give the play a time frame. OK, there's a reference to Les Paul but folks still listen to Les Paul.
Even more, there aren't any establishing expository scenes by which we learn about the characters. Plop! Things happen, people appear and we don't know who, what or why. Young Tom and his new wife show up at the home of Richard, the central character, but three more scenes pass before we learn Tom is Richard's nephew. Such deliberate obscurity doesn't make The Casuals puzzling in a good way, only confusing. More fatal is that we're given insufficient material to form opinions about the characters. Should we like them or not? If an audience is not led to empathize with a character, it won't.
So we don't empathize with WWII veteran Richard, who has helped raise his nephew (we are told) after his brother died in the war. Now Richard is back in Nevada where he grew up, with a civilian job vaguely related to weapons tests and official secrets. But there are personal secrets, too: to protect Tom from the ugly truth, Richard constructed a heroic lie about how his brother died. He's recycled the same lie to assuage the grief of a local widow and her son after their husband/father dies. Trust me, it doesn't play out as clearly as I've stated it. Richard, a decent guy, earns the wrath of nephew and widow when they cotton to his lie. The widow learns through an old tape recording culled from Richard's garbage can. Why she combs through his garbage is a Great Unknown, an unmotivated action.
Director Jonathan Berry has done some outstanding work but is stymied this time. He and his competent cast are caught in a solemn and humorless play with a sameness of tone and pace throughout. Authors Chance Bone and Andrew Burden Swanson have written for each other and not the public. As I said to playwrights during my years as a dramaturg, "The play you think you have written is not the play the audience is perceiving." It beats me why the play is called The Casuals. Kudos to John Wilson (set) and Eleanor Kahn (props) for period accuracy.
