Playwright: Philip Dawkins
TUTU at Chicago Dramatists,
1105 W. Chicago
$20, $15 seniors and students, $12 industry nights Thursdays and Sundays, $10 industry night Dec. 4
( 847 ) 217-0691
www.tutato.com
Runs through: Dec. 18
By Catey Sullivan
Maybe if you saw it stoned, A Still Life In Color would be more palatable. ( That's just a guess, not a suggestion, as of course everyone should always say no to drugs. )
As it is, Philip Dawkins' new play is a mire of new-agey claptrap and fuzzy symbolism trussed up in self-conscious, pseudo-cerebral sensibilities that one expects are supposed to add mythical heft to the piece.
Directed for The Utopian Theatre Asylum ( TUTA ) by the company's artistic director Zeljko Djukic, Still Life tells the meandering story of Boy ( Jeremy Glickstein ) , Girl ( Alice Wedoff ) and Other Girl ( Jacqueline Stone ) . Old Man ( Mike Driscoll ) narrates the tale of kingdom cursed by endless rain. All in the kingdom but Boy, Girl and Other Girl have drowned, thanks to Boy's having invoked the wrath ( and rain ) of the gods years before when he lost his temper and them.
Old Man is either a god himself or incredibly waterproof: It's not quite clear, but we do know he hasn't drowned along with the hoi polloi.
Everything here is heavily stylized, and herein lies a large part of the problem. The stylizations—the Mime Meets Kabuki make-up, the 'Crouching Dragon' ( but without special effects ) slo-mo blocking, the entrance of the narrator, the portentous inflection given lines like 'Love is eternal proximity'—serve to make the piece distinctive, but it's distinction without purpose. None of the elements works to make the story any more compelling.
They serve to first make one ponder whether there is some kind of cosmic and/or Far Eastern meaning to the whole thing, and, second to conclude that no there is not: Old Man just likes swinging his bamboo stick around and Boy, Girl and Other Girl have a thing for kimonos.
Dawkins' story is sometimes intriguing, but ultimately aimless. Boy, Girl and Other Girl form a love triangle. The geometry is important because—we are informed in a moment dripping with the supercilious wisdom—the shortest distance between love is a straight line and the longest distance is a triangle.
The triangle endures for millennia, while a mumbo-jumbo of spells, miracles and incantations unfold.
To their credit, the actors bring genuine verve and energy to their roles and to thankless bits of Lifetime channel movie dialogue along the lines of 'He, being only a He, will never know the well from where your sorrow grows.'
Dawkins' use of colors to describe personality types is the script's strength—the red that defines Other Girl and the green that defines Girl are developed with wonderful monologues.
But those monologues aren't enough to save the production. By the time the multi-hued wall hanging of a phoenix ( which looks like a peacock—you only know it's a phoenix because Old Man says it is ) is pulled across the stage, A Still Life In Color is dead in the water.