Playwright: Werner Schwab
At: Trap Door Theatre
Phone: ( 773 ) 384-0494; $17-$20
Runs through: March 5
Tracy Letts is a gifted writer, a talented actor and quite possibly the worst director in Chicago. He makes precisely the same mistakes with this show as he made last year with Great Men of Science Nos. 21 and 22, which he directed at Lookingglass Theatre. Both plays are comedies of exaggeration featuring highly stylized and improbable situations, plus over-the-top characters and dialogue. With both, Letts' directorial approach has been to push them even farther; to make them louder, larger and more grotesque to the point of literary insensibility and outright assault upon the audience.
Except for a few moments by Beata Pilch as patrician Mrs. Grollfeuer, the concepts of underplaying, refinement, subtlety and even irony are nearly alien to this production. This is odd, for irony certainly is a tool Letts manipulates effectively as a playwright. His most recent play, Man from Nebraska, also demonstrates ( as his previous plays do not ) that he understands subtext and subtlety. But Letts the writer apparently doesn't share with Letts the director.
Truth be told, I didn't walk away from People Annihilation or My Liver is Senseless with much appreciation for the script itself. Contemporary Austrian author Werner Schwab—who feverishly wrote 15 plays before his 1994 death at age 35—appears to be a coprophiliac using bitter comedy to lash out at everything from the artistic impulse, to bourgeois society, to the crypto-fascism of Austrian nationalism. I'm not sure Schwab knew what his focus was, and this production doesn't clarify things.
Set in an apartment building in a provincial city, the play seems to be about the dreams and illusions of poor, middle-class and wealthy members of Austria's social order. There are flashes of wit in Schwab's intentionally fractured and pompous syntax ( as translated by Michael Roloff ) , such as the prescient comment that a man's early death was 'a communication difficulty between Fate and Destiny.' But mostly the absurdist-inspired dialogue takes the form of scatological rants and speech-making. When comedy isn't overtly funny, the actors need subtlety, contrast and surprise to encourage laughter. They need understatement to develop characters who otherwise are not there. Instead, Letts begins with such an emotionally intense screaming match that there's nowhere for the production to go. Clearly it's absurd, but that's not the same as funny.
People Annihilation might work as a type of comic Grand Guignol, a style not inconsistent with the noir-inspired violence of Letts' own plays, Killer Joe and Bug. But Letts doesn't go there except in a few unintentional moments. He seems perfectly happy with heavy-handed overkill, with language as noise rather than sense, with comic book physical action. And I'm perfectly happy to pronounce this production a rare catastrophe for Trap Door.
