Playwright: Keith Huff
At: Chicago Dramatists
Phone: (312) 633-0630; $20-$25
Runs through: Oct. 31
This over-the-top comedy by award-winning author Keith Huff offers audience-participation karaoke (voluntary), archly literate dialogue and a sharp edge that slashes at trust and fidelity in marriage and friendship. Intentionally artificial, The Age of Cynicism, or Karaoke Night at The Hog is theater at 'play,' sketching characters quickly and thinly and giving them rapid repartee references to Shakespeare, Shaw, James Joyce, Dickens, the Three Stooges and popular songs. Director Ann Filmer plays up the artifice with staging somewhere between sitcom gone ballistic and burlesque Edward Albee. The play goes a long way on antics, energy and wit, but ultimately provides neither a conclusive dramatic ending nor answers to the issues it opens. If only it reached some resolution it would have it all. But there's no evidence that Huff wants to find answers; he seems content with theater games alone, and YOU can sing along.
Huff's basic situation is preposterous, although not impossible: married couple Debbie and Don—monarchs of the local Karaoke bar, The Hog—fix up their friends Ellen and Gary. Ellen's a been-round-the-block man-eater, Gary's a prissy (but not effete) 29-year-old virgin, prone to hysterics and a helluva' karaoke singer. They devour each other in marathon sex sessions (unseen), Ellen becomes pregnant, they become engaged. But Ellen and Don have had a long-term affair, and Don thinks he's the father. Since Don and Debbie are childless after 11 married years, all sorts of Albee-ish situations arise between the pratfalls (mainly Gary's) and karaoke numbers which divide one scene from the next.
It might be possible to perform this material in a naturalistic way, but I doubt it and that's not Filmer's way. In Christopher Cordon as Gary she has quite a brilliant, take-no-prisoners, high-energy clown and she lets him cut loose. Think Danny Kaye or Robin Williams. The three other principals have no choice when onstage with Cordon: play up to his energy level or be rendered invisible. Amy Dunalp (Ellen), Wendi Webster (Debbie) and Anish Jethmalani (Don) do just that, but ratchet down in scenes without Cordon (the play does need the occasional respite). The fifth character, nearly independent of the others, is Patrick Brennan, Emcee of The Hog's Karaoke Night. Assisted by Joe, the karaoke engineer, Brennan oversees audience members volunteering to sing, and provides a calming, puckish, mock-suave presence in his partly improvised role.
Susan Kaip's scenic design is efficient rather than lovely, establishing five different locations, chiefly The Hog, which Kaip has detailed with a dart board, beer logos, and a black-and-white linoleum tile floor. Tiffany Trent's costumes make everyone a bit square and Gary a cute, buttoned-to-the-neck odd duck.
Seekers of wisdom stay away; this show's for cynics and singers.
