Cyd Blakewell ( left ) and Levi Petree in ...Willy Rivers. Photo by Matthew Mark Rhodes. Playwright: Stephen Metcalfe. At: SiNNERMAN Ensemble at the Viaduct, 3111 N. Western. Phone: 773-728-3361; $15. Runs through: June 23
Everyman searched in vain for a comrade to accompany him to the grave, but Willy Rivers, the hero of Stephen Metcalfe's 1984 drama, is just trying to find somebody to attend his comeback concert. The popular singer-songwriter may be physically whole again—though his guitar-picking hand still bears the scars of nerve damage—after having been gunned down at the height of his career by a small-time psycho, but his brush with mortality has made him understandably skittish of facing crowds ready to love him, literally, to death.
This production's publicity proclaims the playwright to be the screenwriter for the hit film Pretty Woman, and so he is. But The Incredibly Famous Willy Rivers dates back to the years when Metcalfe wrote intimate little studies populated with characters who thought very carefully before taking action—a lonely veteran and his buddy's sister seeking mutual solace, in Strange Snow, for example, or a female corporate shark who isn't quite ready to abandon it all for love, in Emily.
But just because Metcalfe has never written a thoroughly stupid play doesn't mean that this is a smart one. Not yet comfortable singing in the key of music-industry excess, his lonely-at-the-top insights are based in images already old in 1984, and downright arteriosclerotic in 2007. ( Director Jeff Ginsberg, whose playbill note hints at the reasons behind this geriatric selection, should be aware of this, but chose to ignore it, nonetheless ) . As a post-graduate summer project for alumni of the School at Steppenwolf, performing under the collective title of the SiNNERMAN Ensemble, however, it provides a sturdy showcase for the talents of young actors, many of whom will have departed for greener pastures by autumn.
Among those staying are Levi Petree, his home-grown Elvis accent and boyish features shadowing Willy's ambivalence with a touching vulnerability. Other people to watch are Michael Pogue, whose rasta-rapper never verges on caricature, along with Calliope Porter, delivering a sensitive portrayal of a groupie-with-a-heart-of-gold, and Johnny Russell, playing a disillusioned country-rocker whose fate is possibly the most tragic of all.
In our own time, when a plethora of 'reality' television shows promise cut-rate facsimiles of the celebrity experience, Metcalfe's warning, however dated, is still timely. When a deed as mindlessly spontaneous as one person shooting another rewards both with abundant notoriety, what purpose can there be in suffering the risks and sacrifices engendered by the pursuit of fame for its own sake?