Playwright: Alan Ball
At: BackStage Theatre at Heartland Studio, 7016 N. Glenwood
Phone: (312) 683-5347; $15
Runs through: May 2
Sometimes, the problem with becoming famous is people dig up your past. If you're an artist, work you cut your teeth on can be produced regardless of its worth. Your name suddenly has marquee value.
I suspect marquee value is what the tiny BackStage Theatre company was looking for with its latest production, the saucily titled Balls. Here we have five one acts penned by Alan Ball, the creator of HBO's Six Feet Under and the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of American Beauty (if you aren't aware of these facts, the company has them plastered all over their promotional materials and even swipes the poster art from American Beauty). The show, directed by Danielle Mari, is an uneven bag, rich with ideas, often funny, but often pretentious and unformed, just like one might expect from an artist who was finding his way. In this production, Miri also has a mixed bag with performances that range from pretty good to shockingly bad. Deanna Zibello does a good job with the set, using the Heartland Studio's tiny space to excellent effect.
The five one acts are all connected by the theme of checking the pulse of modern culture and finding it weak. Each act riffs on the dangers of consumerism and self absorption. One deals with a model and her buff boyfriend, another with three shiftless male roommates with little direction in their lives and even less energy, another gives us a portrait of a therapist digging for clues to her patient's outer life while he's trying to shift the focus to his outer life, another presents a marriage proposal under the guise of a corporate merger. And one, the third act—Power Lunch—was so awful I was ready to leave my seat and give up on the whole production. In fact, one person did.
Overall, the show runs two and a half hours (a little over an hour of that time is devoted to the worst one act of the lot, mentioned above), which is about an hour too long. Miri has some jewels in her cast: as a neurotic obsessed with belts and shoes, Matthew R. Kerns is very good, with an excellent sense of comic timing and modulation. Katrina Bennett and Stephen Dunn, in a quartet of roles, acquit themselves admirably. Unfortunately, the work of Manny Sosa (as a slovenly roommate and a chauvinist pig) mars the entire production. Amateurish, wooden, and without a clue as to how to create character, Sosa drags down the entire production; his lack of thespian skills make watching him painful. It really hurts that he's the centerpiece of Power Lunch, which is stale, and tries to mine humor from the fact that men are pigs and women are needy. Old news.
If Power Lunch could be excised (an orchiectomy?) these Balls would swing a lot more freely, although they'd still probably be sterile.