Playwright: Lyle Kessler
At: RiMeChi Theatre Company at City Lit in the Edgewater Presbyterian
Church, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.
Phone: 312-324-0362; $15
Runs through: Sept. 9
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
The ‘masterless man’ (or woman) has long been a favorite of fiction writers searching for a hero of unlimited mobility and potential. Orphans, from Oliver Twist to Homer Welles, represent the most romantic of this literary archetype. Cast loose from filial ties through no fault of their own, their innocence sustains them—or not—on their adventures in the company of kind and not-so-kind strangers.
Treat and Philip, the derelict North Philadelphia siblings in Lyle Kessler’s drama, share a very modern backstory. Deserted by their runaway father, the teenage Treat, upon the subsequent death of their mother, drove off curious DCFS meddlers to assume de facto guardianship of his little brother. Though both have now grown to adulthood, Philip’s perceived asthma still confines him to a housebound existence, while Treat goes forth to support them through petty thievery. But one day, the latter risks bringing home a hostage—Harold, a conspicuously wealthy middle-aged businessman who admits to having been raised in an orphanage himself—and an institutionalized orphan knows tricks unsuspected by isolated young waifs.
It would be easy to play this premise for film noir shivers, replete with feral squalor, Darwinian subtexts and hints of sexual perversion. But the RiMeChi Theatre Company (its name an agglutination of Rhode-Island-Meets-Chicago) takes its cue from, of all places, the Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys films of the 1930s and ’40s, whose sentimental populism fueled Harold’s boyhood fantasies and, gradually, those of his young protégés as well.
As a result, this bare-bones production, directed by Tom Reedy, features expressive, but never self-indulgent, performances by Richard Leo Madison, Seth Remington and John Arthur Lewis (the last already distinguished on the storefront circuit for his Vronsky in Anna Karenina and Agamemnon in The Orestia last season) who walk the line between gritty realism and male-bonding soap to earn every testosterone-infused tear generated by its tough-tender dénouement.
August is the season for new companies to test their footing before the post-labor day rush. If this debut presentation is representative of this immigrant troupe’s work, look for RiMeChi to forge itself a presence on the off-off-Loop scene.