Playwright: Richard Greenberg
At: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted
Phone: ( 312 ) 335-1650; $35-$55
Always entertainingly glib and pungently comic, playwright Richard Greenberg has grown over the last decade to embrace complex characters and metaphysics, while sharpening his instincts for high theatrics. His plays continue to be amusing but also have become thought-provoking and surprising. Author of Three Days of Rain and The Dazzle ( both produced at Steppenwolf ) , Greenberg's current Broadway hit is the gay-themed baseball play, Take Me Out.
The Violet Hour, his most recent effort, is set in New York in 1919 during the post-World War I birth of the Jazz Age. In a fantastic twist, young publisher John Pace Seaveringthe play's herois given knowledge of the future. He discovers that those dearest to him meet horrible ends, due to his decisions the very day the play takes place. Briefly entering a time warp, Seavering alters his decisions only to find his friends meet earlier, and equally horrible, ends. Back in reality ( ? ) , he accepts the burden of his painful prescience, and his inability to constructively alter history.
Greenberg has immense fun with Seavering and his clerk as they unpeel the future, discovering such un-1919 words as existential, TV, bogus, co-opt and the changing meaning of the word gay. He pokes fun at literary style ( especially through the Fitzgerald-like McCleary, a young novelist ) as well as theatrical convention. But he also wrestles credibly with the issues of personal responsibility vs. the unpredictability of life's events, fact vs. memory and history vs. truth.
Greenberg always provides meaty leads and deftly drawn supporting roles, and the Steppenwolf actors bite into them with confidence and relish under Terry Kinney's dead-on direction, perfectly balancing comedy and drama, wonder and awe. Josh Hamilton ( Seavering ) and Ora Jones ( Jessie Brewster ) are beautifully understated as interracial lovers, limning the passion, humor and differences that draw them together. Kevin Stark and Kate Arrington ( welcome back to Chicago ) are equally adept as the emotional McCreary and his emotionally frailer love interest. In a showy and hilarious turn, Tim Hopper eschews his usual manly persona to play the effete ( although not gay ) clerk, Gidger. All are handsomely costumed by Mara Blumenfeld ( high period style for the women ) against Robert Brill's evocative skyscraper-of-yesteryear scenery.
There are gaps in Greenberg's metaphysicswhich date back to Oedipus and the Greek concept of fatebecause he's pondering unanswerables, and there are gaps in his characters because he bites off so much to create a microcosm of an America yet to come. The interracial love affair, or the relationship between a writer and his publisher, might fill this play by themselves. And what does become of the comic cipher, Gidger? Nonetheless, the play is so engaging and the acting so good, the gaps disappear.