Playwright: Joe Penhall
At: Northlight Theatre, 9501 N. Skokie Blvd. in Skokie
Phone: (847) 673-9501; $32-$48
Runs through: March 7
You might call Christopher your run-of-the-mill ghetto oddball. A denizen of London's West Indian immigrant community, the young loner works at a fruit market where the police caught him one day wanking off with the produce. Detained for psychological evaluation, he tells the shrink that oranges are blue and that he is the illegitimate son of Idi Amin. There's no question that Chris is nutso—the question is whether he's nutso enough to be held in custody longer than the 28 days allowed by the terms of his arrest. The question WE ask ourselves, however, is whether the two doctors bickering obsessively over his fate likewise belong in rubber rooms.
Dr. Bruce Flaherty wants to keep him. Dr. Robert Smith wants to release him. The former proclaims his patient alienated from reality, the latter asks from WHOSE reality, citing cultural and lifestyle factors (the R.D. Laing argument, for those taking notes). Flaherty invokes long lists of Latinate symptoms, Smith counters with prevalence of those same symptoms in modern society (again, Laing). Flaherty huffs that it is their duty to cure the sick, Smith fears a harmless citizen becoming lost in The System. And, by the way, Flaherty is bucking for a promotion and Smith is writing a book on the very issues raised by Chris' case.
Playgoers recalling Profiles Theatre's 2002 production of Some Voices are aware of the tendency for playwright Joe Penhall's agenda —in both plays, an indictment of the British Public Health Service—to eclipse his story, making for cartoon-flat characters differentiated only by their inflexible opinions. Northlight director David Cromer recognizes the limited urgency of Penhall's mission (to American audiences, anyway) as well as the minimal opportunities for movement posed by a set consisting only of a table, three chairs and a water-cooler, even if the whole room DOES revolve between scenes.
The split-second verbal timing exhibited by BJ Jones as the suave Smith, David Matthew Warren as the blustering Flaherty and Tarell Alvin McCraney as the innocent—maybe—Christopher, generate a high-stakes tension that transforms what could have emerged as an academic harangue into a Pinteresque power struggle between two men preaching humanity while practicing self-interest. Who do YOU think wins?