Playwright: Tom Stoppard
At: Piccolo Theatre at the Evanston Art Depot, 600 Main St. in Evanston
Phone: ( 847 ) 424-0089; $15-$20
Runs through: May 7
Piccolo Theatre has made great strides toward transforming what is, by day, Metra's Main Street station-house into, by night, the cozy Evanston Arts Depot. But if the current rendering of Tom Stoppard's two one-act plays is any indication, the price of their efforts are some fatal shortcuts in production values.
Piccolo Theatre's commedia dell'arte aesthetic mandates text employed less as a script than as a scenario, upon which the performing troupe then imposes its own interpretive concepts—a 1974 Italian political satire re-imagined as an episode of The Honeymooners, for example. But their text this time is drawn from Stoppard's look-ma-I'm-a-genius period: The Real Inspector Hound proposes a pair of drama critics who just can't stay out of the play they are covering, even at peril to their own lives. After Magritte is a whodunit written in oxymorons—an homage to the title surrealist's famous painting of a pipe flanked by the caption 'This is not a pipe'. The first utilizes the science-fiction device of parallel universes to parody not only the British murder-mystery melodrama, but the pretensions of theater journalists. The second is a one-joke exercise designed to showcase the verbal dexterity of its author.
Both conceits are perplexing enough in themselves, but a theater company schooled in classical improvisation does not easily abandon its stores of Funny Business, which the players proceed to pile on as thickly as if Stoppard himself was one with the stuffy establishment he lampoons. Some of the actors have the technical expertise to focus their clowning in character—Ken Raabe's blustery newshound, for example, and Devorah Eizikovic Richards' robotic maid—but the uneven level of experience among the cast members too often makes for the run-in-circles-and-scream ambiance of students attempting their first Ionesco.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with attempting to 'mix farce's zaniness with Stoppard's depths', but in taking too narrow a view of both, production director Zachary Davis forces them to cancel each other out. Still, if 'silly' was Davis' goal—as the frequency with which the word appears in his playbill note indicates—his show certainly cannot be said to lack in THAT quality.