Playwright: Tom Kempinski
At: Stockyards Theatre Project at
Victory Gardens, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Phone: (773) 871-3000; $25
Runs through: July 18
Jacqueline Du Pré was a brilliant musician, internationally celebrated even to having a rose bred and named for her. A vase of these horticultural tributes are illuminated center stage in this Stockyards Theatre Project production, whose personnel have likewise labored long and hard to bring this reflection of their talents to full bloom. Tom Kempinski's play, allegedly 'inspired by' Du Pré's life, is unworthy of both, however.
Some of its problems are unsurprising, given its subject: For most of the play's duration, Stephanie Abrams is confined by multiple sclerosis to a wheelchair, and her psychiatrist, Dr. Feldmann, by professional custom to her desk, reducing the opportunities for kinetic interaction. And since Kempinski's personae speak in long, oratorical monologues more resembling formal debate than actual conversation, verbal exchanges are also largely of the talking-heads variety, making for an overall stasis as crippling as the disease under discussion. Nor does it help that the characters are written as generic stereotypes—yes, Feldmann has a German accent—who conceal and reveal as the plot and incidental music demand, oblivious to the internal logic of their discourse.
Fortunately, Michele DiMaso and Dawn Alden—renowned for their athletic prowess in action-oriented roles—are as pertinacious as the personalities they portray, and director Lynn Ann Bernatowicz as ingenious at circumventing the impediments presented by Kempinski's text. Feldmann's devotion to classical music permits Alden an occasional stroll across the office to switch off the tape-deck. DiMaso does some clever wheelie-waltzing in Abrams' state-of-the-art perambulator. And in one riveting scene, Abrams falls prone to the floor and refuses assistance as she slowly and painfully climbs the alpine range that her chair has now become.
The effort and goodwill invested—did I mention that a portion of Duet For One's ticket sales go to the Chicago Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society?—almost redeems the stiffness of the material in whose service it is expended and the suspension of disbelief required to absorb Kempinski's message of gloomy fatalism after such positive depictions of MS as Mierka Girten's With Or Without Wings. That it all comes off as engagingly as it does is the REAL lesson in art overcoming obstacles.