Playwright: Emily Schwartz. At: Strange Tree Group at the Athenaeum, 2935 N. Southport. Tickets: 800-982-2787; www.ticketmaster.com; $25. Runs through: Nov. 20
Over the last five years Strange Tree Group has created imaginative, engaging theater pieces exploring myth, fable, fairy tale and the nature of narrative storytelling itself. Under artistic director and chief playwright Emily Schwartz, their work has been visually and aurally complex. This time, The War Plays explores a narrative voice much closer to realistic drama than previous Strange Tree work I've seen. To be blunt, it's the first Strange Tree effort I'd rate a failure. The lighting is spotty and dark, some of the acting is bad and fundamental creative decisions seem odd, at best. Is director Kate Nawrocki entirely to blame? It's hard to say when the playwright also leads the theater troupe.
Set in 1940, The War Plays relates how three couples in London and in the States connect or reconnect as World War II rages: British boy meets U.S. girl during a London air raid; a G.I. about to ship out falls for a taxi dancer and vice versa; and a war-wounded vet cautiously reconnects with the woman he left behind. None of the situations is entirely original, which is OK, but all feel unfinished at the play's end, which isn't OK. In 75 minutes we get one scene from each story, and then the actors take curtain calls where one expects intermission. I sat unsure for two minutes. "It can't be over," I said to myself. The War Plays arouses my interest but doesn't satisfy my curiosity.
A five-piece band and a singer are integral to the production, providing flavor and commentary through song on the wartime setting and stories. But only a few of the period songs the band performs are specifically identified with World War II, and there's no effort to reproduce an early 1940s musical style. It's difficult to guess if the amateurish quality of playing is intentionally metatheatrical.
Of the three plays, only the third and longest develops any critical mass. It's set in East Coast upper-crust society at a tennis party that reunites war-shocked Elliott and his fiancée of a year earlier. It smacks a bit of Oscar Wilde and a great deal of Noel Coward, proving that Emily Schwartz can talk the talk of this sort of play. But it requiresand doesn't haveelegant comedy-of-manners style, especially since the production's framing device is a British theater troupe performing during The Blitz ( thus accounting for the war-torn scenery and, perhaps, the dingy lighting ) . Also: The show's press release gives a 1940 setting for The War Plays ... but the United States had not yet entered the war, so how could Elliott have been fighting in Italy, or a taxi-dancing G.I. be shipping out? Yeah, picky-picky, but that's why they pay me the big bucks.