Playwright: John Olive
At: Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company at Angel Island, 735 W. Sheridan
Phone: ( 773 ) 871-0442; $18-$22
Runs through: April 9
Y'see, there's this pulp-fiction writer. That statement alone would be enough to get our attention, even if our story didn't transpire during a sweltering urban summer and our scribbler wasn't living in a seedy rooming house populated by—well, the sort of people who appear in pulp-fiction novels: a manic-depressive layabout who sleepwalks in his jockeys, a hard-drinking war veteran plagued by headaches and hallucinations and a tightly wound landlady whose abusive husband has just returned after a stretch in prison. Given a sordid environment such as this, we quickly divine that somebody's gonna get hurt. But since our playwright is John Olive, author of Standing On My Knees and Voice Of The Prairie, we also expect the lurid violence to be accompanied by a certain gritty romance.
The biggest challenge facing the Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company isn't its thriller's copious sex, murder and sadistic perversion, however. Nor is it the numerous locales dripping with chiaroscurotic quasi-film noir atmosphere that must be fitted to Angel Island's tiny stage ( a boat-in-the-bottle trick accomplished with ease by the tech-team of Grant Sabin, Nick Matonich, Tiffany Bullard, Bud Johnson and Terry Charles ) . It's not even the bursts of Algrenesque poetry that leap like Goya's imps from hard-boiled characters' mouths at the most unlikely moments.
Nope, what makes or breaks presentations in this genre is the propensity of its denizens to communicate in grunts, monosyllables, sighs, screams, moans, hisses and an array of inarticulate noises nevertheless steeped in significant subtext that we must comprehend immediately, even when expressed only as 'Huh!', 'Hmmph!' or 'Aaaaagh!'. Fortunately, director Robert Breuler is an old hand at this mode of discourse, having himself played the struggling writer in the seminal 1988 Steppenwolf production. Under his razor-edged guidance, a seasoned ensemble—led by Richard Cotovsky as the enigmatic words linger, and featuring riveting performances by Karl Potthoff, Hans Fleischmann, Joseph E. Hudson and K.K. Dodds—chart the progress of Olive's lost souls with the sleek and unhurried grace of an alley cat stalking its prey.
