Playwright: Drew Dir
At: Hypatia Theatre Company at Profiles Theatre, 4147 N. Broadway
Phone: 312-714-0571; $20
Through: Aug. 19
BY SCOTT C. MORGAN
What is it about the Deep South that allows playwrights to get away with poetical flights of fancy? Perhaps the South's heat-choked humidity and sing-song dialect allows for languorous contemplation of emotions normally kept under check further up north.
Drew Dir certainly turns up eccentric southern temperatures for his world premiere play, A Love Plot Truly, for Hypatia Theatre Company. Though you can sense echoes of Tennessee Williams reverberating here and there, Dir forges his own poetics and touches of fantasy to explore a plucky heroine who comically stretches the truth in order to fix her poor family's problems.
Tomboy Irene ( Susan Wingerter ) is a bundle of energy, constantly chasing fireflies or taking down or reapplying the outdoor Christmas lights in the month of August, even though her single mother ( Rebecca Sohn ) didn't ask her to do it. Smart and gifted ( having jumped ahead a few grades in school ) , Irene is on the cusp of a grown-up adolescence that doesn't seem to welcoming for her and her poor family in a rural Georgia town.
First there's the scandal of Irene's older sister, Lily ( Amanda Monfrooe ) , who lies in bed with paralyzed legs after giving her child up for adoption and divorcing her husband. Lily's weak-willed ex-husband just happens to be the son of their mother's icy domineering boss, Miss Tamara ( Joan McGrath ) , whom Irene has playfully nicknamed 'Snickerdoodle.'
Irene also has a budding fascination of the forbidden subject of 'not straight' people, just as she starts facing down adults who start calling her a 'dyke'—though Irene has no idea what that means.
Into this fraught atmosphere, a handsome drifter named John Cooke ( Shane Kenyon ) arrives at Irene's doorstep. Irene tries to set John up with Lily, even though there are rumors that he might be a drug dealer in town.
Director K. Michael Renehan steers his cast to fun performances, straddling an enchanting middle ground that comically flirts with tragedy and mourns the joy of fleeting childhood. If only there could have been more whimsy to the skeletal set design. ( No designer was credited in the program. )
Dir declines to set A Love Plot Truly in a specific era, though the references to crack/cocaine and gay people in a rural town pegs it somewhere between the 1980s and now. One intriguing aspect of Dir's writing is that you can take it at face value, or you can interpret moments coming from Irene's imagination as a vain attempt to improve her family's bleak lives.
Though things don't end happily in the somewhat confusing ending, Dir creates invigorating characters and dialogue that make the play a pleasure to sit through. A Love Plot Truly shows off Dir's distinct voice as a playwright and pegs him as someone to watch out for in the future.