Brian Stojak and Robin Kacyn in Killing Women. Photo courtesy of Theatre Seven________
REVIEW
Killing Women
Playwright: Marisa Wegrzyn
Where: Theatre Seven at
the Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago
Telephone: 563-505-7645
( 312-633-0630 ) ; $20
Runs through: Sept. 2
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
Examine assassins as they show up in pop culture and you'll find a world that predominantly male and preposterously suave. The outlandishly expensive shoes and fantastical techno-toys of Bond; the chiseled, stoic heroics of Bourne; and the testosterone-crazed stylings of Vincent Vega—it's a mostly manly world out there in the land of cold-blooded killers.
In Marisa Wegrzyn's alternately confounding and intriguing Killing Women, we get another—and a wonderfully original—take on the lives of assassins. Herein is a story of female killers toiling in the land of Dilbert. Office politics, sexist bosses, shoddy training programs and shoddier childcare choices—the killing women of Killing Women might as well be working for Wal-Mart.
At the final preview performance of Killing Women, the Theatre Seven production directed by Brian Golden unspooled as an entertaining but ultimately uneasy mix of comic book adventure and emotional realism. Wegrzyn's ideas are marvelous. Her juxtaposition of styles is nettlesome. For the most part, Killing Women is steeped in playful, bold-strokes drama, a tale told through characters rooted in caricature and satire rather than flesh-and-blood authenticity. In its final scenes, however, Killing Women veers into something else again, and ends on a note that's more frustrating than satisfying.
At the center of the story is the tough-talking Abby ( Margot Bordelon, moving like Marlene Dietrich and speaking like Humphrey Bogart ) . Spouting wisdom like 'Don't date the prey, it's ineffective,' and emitting righteous feminist fumes when the ( male ) boss refuses to hire a young mother because—as he explains between shots of Jack Daniels and Mylanta—women with children are incapable of bringing adequate focus to careers outside the home, Abby is more archetype than real person.
So is sweet, single mom Gwen ( Tracey Kaplan, terrific in a Susie-Homemaker-as-School-of-the-Americas graduate ) , whose unbeatable aim should put her on a career fast track. Equally amusing is Lucy ( Robin Kacyn ) , a maternal seductress whose soft heart causes her to abandon gunshots in favor of lethal injections. All three women are over the top, so when Killing Women asks the audience to empathize with them as genuine people, the production runs into trouble. It's difficult to create a mood of authentic suspense—something that Wegrzyn attempts toward the close of Killing Women—when the people on stage more iconic types than relatable flesh-and-blood beings.
The final scene of Killing Women is the most troublesome, in large part because it feels like it belongs in another play entirely. Wegrzyn uses the scene to invoke some baffling symbolism involving the moon and a princess. The final moments of Killing Women are abrupt and confounding: The comedy comes to a screeching, unexpected stop. In the end, the audience is left in midair, puzzling over what's just transpired.
REVIEW
The Odd Couple
Playwright: Neil Simon
At: Drury Lane Oak Brook,
100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace
Phone: 630-530-0111; $25-$50
Through Oct. 7
BY SCOTT C. MORGAN
Two men share a New York apartment while sparring like a married couple. No, it's not the plot of the latest dramatic treatise on same-sex marriage, but yet another revival of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple.
No doubt, the typically right-leaning residents of DuPage County would get up in arms if Drury Lane Oak Brook presented any other male pair who weren't the platonic duo of sloppy schlub Oscar Madison and obsessive-compulsive neat freak Felix Unger. Drury Lane sticks with the traditionally safe 1965 Broadway chestnut instead of performing Simon's 1985 female Odd Couple revision or his 2002 updating.
The choice to go with the original Odd Couple may not be adventurous programming, but you can't really complain much with Greg Kolack's solid comic direction and savvy casting. Yet, in light of the whole Queer Eye for the Straight Guy TV metrosexual makeover craze and the roiling debates over same-sex marriage, you can't help watch the show and ponder Felix's stereotypically fey behavior.
In addition to maintaining a meticulously clean home, Felix is a fabulous chef and reads Better Homes and Gardens. Felix also betrays no physical interest in the curvaceous British Pigeon sisters during a double date ( though he says it's guilt from not being officially divorced yet ) .
Though it would be an interesting choice to have Felix played as a closet case who clings desperately to the tatters of his straight marriage, it would have gone against the play's main conflict of a slob's way of life being disrupted by a tidy busybody. Any stereotypical heterosexual spats between the two men over coming home late or burnt dinner is just an added comic bonus.
Though the material is overly familiar, the actors have great fun fleshing out Simon's snappy one-liners and come backs. Dan Rodden wonderfully embodies the sloppy Oscar, from his potbelly to his believable New York accent. He's a great Felix foil to Dan Rooden, who never goes over the top with his character's annoying sinus problems.
Playing Oscar and Felix's poker buddies, David Kortemeier, Dev Kennedy, Mark Czoske and Brooks Darrah each fits in naturally and have all the laughs down. The same goes for Carrie Lee Patterson and Elizabeth Ledo as the giddy Pigeon sisters, each having fun in Elizabeth P. Wislar's loudly patterned swinging '60s costumes.
Though Simon has updated The Odd Couple to reflect societal changes ( and to add to the Jack Lemmon/Walter Mattheu Grumpy Old Man film franchise with an Odd Couple II sequel ) , it's doubtful they'll last as long as the original. So if you want a same-sex marriage comedy, you'll just have to find another play.
REVIEW
Red Light Winter
Playwright: Adam Rapp
At: Thunder and Lightning Ensemble at Trap Door, 1655 W. Cortland
Phone: 773-332-9939; $15
Runs through: Sept. 9
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Have you heard the one about the guy who hires his best buddy a hooker? Sure you have! You've also heard the one about the all-American boys seeking exotic thrills in foreign lands who fall awry of an all-American girl likewise bent on adventure. And the one about the sensitive, selfless, noble-naïf doggedly protecting a wayward damsel from her own weakness? Oh, scribblers have been telling that one for three centuries, at least. So even on first viewing of Adam Rapp's play, it's no surprise that nearly every plot twist should be exactly what we anticipate.
The knight in shabby armor this time is Matt, a shy would-be writer from New York City, whose hoggish pal, Davis, has taken him on a restorative trip to Amsterdam, further therapy to be administered by a prostitute, also procured by his host. Davis makes no secret of having sampled the goods first, a factor somewhat mitigating his generous gesture—especially since his own theft of Matt's sweetheart is responsible for the latter's gloom. Unfortunately, Christina is not a professional harlot, but a bourgeois young lady whose fanciful charade collapses under her infatuation with the bad-boy Davis. A return to their native turf only hastens their tragic—but, ironically, not unexpected—fates.
Rapp's fault is not in his recycling of Vie de Bohéme motifs ( Who doesn't enjoy a good cry? ) , but that he endows his two men with underlying motives for their actions—the boisterous Davis is playing at being a Big Shot, the reclusive Matt is playing at being a Suffering Artist—while never telling us why Christina does what she does, though her mistakes are the most self-destructive of the fatal triangle. This dramatic flaw has in no way affected Red Light Winter's popularity on the storefront circuit following its 2005 premiere, but it heightens the challenge facing the company of this Thunder and Lightning Ensemble production.
Under Chris Arnold's Spartan direction, however, the actors immerse themselves in their generic personae to inspire empathy despite the shallowness of their material. The prototype for the neurasthenic Matt is Woody Allen, but brawny Andy Hagar wears his mannerisms with grace and composure, while Andrew Carl resists the temptation to distance himself from the repellent Davis through cartoonish exaggeration. Sadie Rogers, however, goes beyond the call of duty to render Christina, not simply a foil, but an active participant whose final act of defiant retaliation against her abuser does not go overlooked.
REVIEW
Camino Real
Playwright: Tennessee Williams
At: Mom And Dad Productions at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport
Phone: 773-935-6860; $20
Runs through: Sept. 15
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Sooner or later, every playwright discovers—or believes himself to have discovered—Strindberg, Pirandello, Brecht or any of a number of seminal theatre artists proposing an alternative to dramatic realism. In 1953, Tennessee Williams responded to his society's social tensions—the McCarthy scourge; the post-WW II boom economy and subsequent proliferation of tourism; repressive attitudes toward homosexuality; and other individualistic behavior—with an epic jeremiad borrowing from a welter of prototypes.
Our play opens on a plaza in a border town on the historical Royal Highway—El Camino Real, but here pronounced 'CA-mino Reel'—where a Checkpoint Charlie scrutinizes travelers looking to cross into the unnamed land beyond. The wayfarers include such international celebrities as Don Quixote, Lord Byron, Giacomo ( sic ) Casanova, Marguerite Gautier ( a.k.a. La Dame Aux Camellias ) and the ubiquitous Yankee known only as Kilroy, along with the expected regional and expatriate types—gypsies, hustlers, thieves, innkeepers, tourists, nouveau-riche moguls, faded aristocrats and the grotesquely comic 'street cleaners' who dispose of the dead. On this day, like every other, they pass the time in various ways, bestirring themselves only when an opportunity to flee their torpid environment presents itself.
Williams' romantic outlook and microcosmic orientation are ill-equipped to support such a load of critical propaganda—an observation made at its premiere, and no less valid today—emerging in moments of lyrical delicacy all but swamped in heavily symbolic spectacle, sprawl exacerbated by Mom and Dad Productions' scattershot approach to their material. The first duty of a director is to make everyone look like they belong on the same stage, but Joe Feliciano seems more focused on the three characters he portrays, himself, than on finding and enforcing a strong central metaphor to rescue the text from its own excess.
Left to their own devices, the actors adopt a hodgepodge of stylistic mannerisms ranging from Stanislavskian empathy to quasi-Mel Brooks slapstick. The results make for intriguing stage pictures, but a play that clocks in at two and a half hours needs more than exotic visual panoramas to elevate its purpose, however heartfelt, above the level of drama-club exercise.
