Playwright: Emily Schwartz
At: Scott Dray Productions, LLC, in conjunction with the Strange Tree
Group, at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport Ave.
Phone: ( 773 ) 935-6860; $15
Runs through: June 17
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
What distinguishes parody from spoof is the extent to which the audience is expected to laugh at the replication of the literary conventions under examination. By that definition, however, Emily Schwartz' Funeral Wedding begins as spoof, quickly retreats into parody and finishes so faithful to its prototype that we almost forget that it's not the real thing. And if this is bad news for those lazy readers who skated through English lit on Cliff's Notes, it's a welcome treat for fans of the 19th-century Gothic novel.
Our narrator is a Byronic young man, living a cloistered existence in his parents' gloomy mansion, his agoraphobia rooted in boyhood trauma resulting from his witnessing the murder of two little girls by a sexual predator. His morose mother and patient father are helpless to deliver him from his melancholy, but his Brontean sister remains loyal to their childhood fantasy of escape. When the latter announces her intent to marry the sinister family doctor, however, her timid brother must overcome his nightmares and take action to rescue his beloved companion from a life of lingering misery.
Schwartz eases us gradually into her genre's lugubrious tone with such Brechtian devices as Scott Cupper's one-man band supplying incidental music on an array of instruments from stageside, in addition to changing placards and serving as utility man for the characters, who address us directly when occasion demands—even to calling upon us ( in vain, of course ) to aid them. There is also a sprinkling of anachronistic references—'cue-cards,' to cite one—and a gratuitously silly confession delivered in rhymed couplets.
What keeps the entire evening from emerging as likewise fatuous, however, are intensely focused performances delivered, under the direction of Kerstin Broockmann and Jesse Geiger, by a straight-faced ensemble featuring Matthew Holzfeind and Carol Enoch ( whom playgoers may remember as Geneva Derbyshire from last season's The Dastardly Ficus ) as the heroic siblings. And if your attention still wanders during the course of a yarn that proceeds at Victorian pace, there is plenty in Kris Stengrevics' tantalizingly cluttered period set to beguile the time.