Playwright: Thornton Wilder
At: BackStage Theatre Company at the Chopin, 1543 W. Division St.
Phone: ( 312 ) 683-5347; $15
Runs through: April 2
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
In 1942, novelist-turned-playwright Thornton Wilder set out to write a sweeping full-length dramatic epic of human history as seen through the eyes of an exemplary Republican family, narrated in the non-representational style associated with Bertolt Brecht—e.g., actors breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly, or even dropping character entirely. His goal was also to mock the artificial conventions of theatrical realism as it existed in his day, and to reassure post-WW II audiences that American values would ultimately triumph over aberrant foreign elements. AND to do ALL of this in a SINGLE play.
Confronted with staging so busy a project, the logical choice would be to reduce the clutter. Instead, BackStage Theatre opts to AUGMENT it, adding a trio of quasi-Andrews Sisters warblers to entertain us in the lobby where we are banished during the two intermissions while the Chopin's downstairs playing-space is wholly reconfigured ( producing uniformly obstructive sightlines in the second act ) . As if to compensate for the protracted running time, the actors rush shrilly through action crowded with distracting stage business. ( Who can listen to characters talk while a cute baby dinosaur chases its tail? Or attend to the oracles proclaimed in Steve Hickson's Gypsy-crone drag turn? ) . Further compounding the confusion is director Brandon Bruce's decision to update some of the period references—a faux behind-the-scenes accident has victims evacuated to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, for example—while retaining others, as in the speech where a play-within-the-play actress of an age to make The Odd Couple as mossy as Gammer Gurton's Needle waxes nostalgic for popular shows from circa 1920.
Floundering in this flood of achronistic motifs, the actors cling to their text like shipwrecked passengers to flotation devices. Michael Pacas and Melissa Riemer champion middle-American values with poker-faced aplomb, Rebekah Ward-Hays steps lively through the multi-dimensional paces mandated by her role as Sabina-the-survivor ( made up to look, for some reason, like Helen Gurley Brown ) , supported by a squadron of stalwart, if scene-stealing, supporting players. In the end, the reverence for Wilder's bloated script exhibited by these hard-working young performers proves to be their undoing.