Playwright: Jed Alexander and Joe Kendall
At: Red Tape Theatre Company at the Lakeshore Theater, 3157 N. Broadway
Phone: ( 773 ) 472-3492; $15
Runs through: August 10
As we enter the auditorium, the woman who will soon identify herself as 'Joanne Alexander' is seen working at her desk onstage. While the house lights are still up, she explains to us that her brother will be playing Richard III in her one-person adaptation of Shakespeare's history play. Sera, her stage manager, thinks this a bad idea—brother Glen is schizophrenic, she warns, and prone to immersing himself too deeply into his role. Exactly, says Joanne, 'Evil is unpredictable and so is Glen! It's all part of the artistic process.'
But process to what purpose? Our auteuse encourages the nerdy Glen to improvise off-text, then interrupts him when he does. This is when she isn't blaming Sera for permitting Glen to misbehave—in properly creative ways, that is. Sera, in turn, allows herself to be humiliated by her boss and gulled by Glen's lavish—if likewise patronizing—flattery. In the end, Joanne is left alone with the realization that she is her own quintessential villain.
Where does Joanne get the money to waste time in pointless exercises and protracted haranguing? And if her industry serves only her own ambitions, as Richard's did his, what are we to make of co-playwrights Jed Alexander and Joe Kendall's? The conceit of having their characters' interpersonal dynamic parallel that of Shakespeare's is blunted by our uncertainty as to their goal. If this hour-long show was intended as a satire on contemporary dramatic theorists, its humor is largely restricted to its own academic community. And if Alexander and Kendall are out to lampoon a SPECIFIC target—as the yappy-dog voice employed by Sarah Ball in her portrayal of the tyrannical Joanne indicates—its appeal is even more parochial. Why should we pay admission to watch somebody else draw a moustache on their teacher's picture?
The classroom formula in literary criticism is to first determine what the author set out to do and then assess how well they accomplished their goal. Red Tape Theatre Company's production values cannot be faulted, but the ambiguity of both My Richard and the play within it renders both these questions ultimately unanswerable.