Playwright: Gregory Burke
At: A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells
Phone: ( 312 ) 943-8722; $14-$20
Runs through: March 6
In any revolution, you've got your target, actual or symbolic. You've got your visionaries, burning with heroic dreams of a utopian world, and you've usually got observers analyzing the event with real or imagined detachment. But always, you've got a few chronic badasses taking advantage of the upheaval to engage in antisocial, illegal, adrenaline-fueled, off-with-their-heads mayhem.
Author Gregory Burke shows us the entire spectrum with only four characters: Tom is a warehouse security guard with a Ph.D. in economics, not above accepting a bribe to look the other way during what he understands to be a burglary. Gary is a third-generation labor activist bent on kidnapping, enlightening and then executing a Capitalist Pig—preferably of the Japanese variety. Frank is the factory inspector from practically next door whose lowly status puts a damper on Gary's grandiose scenario of striking out against the Big Bosses. But then there's Eddie, his gun-toting buddy, who's been reading Sartre and watching gangster movies, and who now wants to see blood.
Up until Burke has his characters hold round-table discussions of local issues generally lost on us yankee swine, the dialogue has all the humorous snap and crackle of a David Mamet caper-gone-stupid, with only the addition of Eva Breneman's accurate, but never overwhelming, dialects. And since an industrial county in Scotland with a street named for a Russian cosmonaut is a place where ANYTHING can happen, we pay close attention even as we chuckle at the ineptitude of rebels as petty as their cause.
The cast for this American premiere production reunites long-time company members Michael Shannon ( recently of Broadway and Hollywood ) and Guy VanSwearingen, who play off each other in their close quarters with the comradely ease of seasoned veterans. They are matched in vigor by Steve Schine as the effete Tom and John Judd as the weary Frank. So much muscle in so small a space would ordinarily be—and frequently has been—an invitation to testosteronic excess. But director Karen Kessler never allows the action to crowd us, keeping the pace and performances comfortably within the dramatic, as well as physical, dimensions of Burke's microcosmic manifesto.