Playwright: Eric Schmiedl
At: Backstage Theatre Company at the Heartland Studio, 7016 N. Glenwood Ave.
Phone: ( 312 ) 683-5347; $12-$15
Runs through: August 28
Theatergoers will be relieved to learn that no refresher course in the poetry of the Italian Renaissance is needed for this 'wacky, wild and intense' allegory purporting to be 'loosely based on Dante's Inferno'. All we need to know of its literary roots is that circa 1307, Dante Alighieri took a tour of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell, entitling his account of the journey The Divine Comedy. Its most well-known segment, unsurprisingly, is the stroll through the lake-of-fire district, a sign at whose entrance warns, 'Abandon hope, all ye who enter here'.
What our play's premise DOES require is for us to envision a corporate office—in this case, that of a toy manufacturer—whose workforce all seems to have attended high school together, where whole families are on the payroll, and employment therewith is as important to its personnel as life and death. Our heroine's descent into the netherworld of bureaucratic cyberspace begins with a missent merchandise order. As she tries in vain to correct her error, she encounters a series of counselors who mostly advise her to lie low, pass the buck and hope that the proverbial fan aims itself at somebody else.
According to the author's note in the playbill, Eric Schmiedl means Denise Druczweski's Inferno to be a parable on moral responsibility in business—a trait he finds sorely lacking in our society today. But his analogies are constantly undermined by a plethora of dummies-with-desks harhars. A running gag focused on a singularly demonic-visaged doll soon grows tedious, as does the obligatory steam between an Antonio Banderas-styled baristo and a middle-management babe.
The Backstage Theatre Company likewise struggles to overcome their text's stereotypes. Eric Paskey delivers a sweetly uncaricatured portrayal of the computer wizard who accompanies Denise through the labyrinthine bowels of industry during an electrical failure. Ben Martini and Lori Grupp are also to be commended for making their various gargoyles no more grotesque than necessary. And Sean Sullivan's scenic design efficiently utilizes every square inch of the tiny Heartland Studio, while Matthew W. Roth conjures slyly-humorous lighting effects—monitor-screens that glow red when a malfunction occurs, for example—that Lucifer himself might envy.