Playwright: Wendy MacLeod
At: Steppenwolf Garage, 1624 N. Halsted
Phone: ( 312 ) 335-1650; $12
Runs through: June 22
Everything about Jack is big and noisy and crude. Everything about Bill is small and quiet and refined. But both are white-collar
dronesJack is an accountant, Bill travels for a Canadian liquor company. Both are married, drink beer and watch television. Jack
has kids, Bill doesn't. Oh, yeahJack's wife has recently divorced him, while Bill's wife is conspicuously unenthusiastic about joining
him in their new condo ( a prefab cell as starkly impersonal as an army barracks ) . And Jack's just learned that he has cancer. Neither
of these men expected to have turned out this way, stranded in a suburban existential limbo with only one another for comfort.
If Things Being What They Are was a comedy, this pair would be Oscar and Felix. If a social commentary, they'd be Dennis Patrick
and Peter Boyle in the 1970 film, Joe. And in a more typical Wendy MacLeod play, they'd be grotesque caricatures twisted by the
pressures of a contradictory universe. But this time, MacLeod likes her characters more than she does easy agendas or flip one-
liners, and her compassion for these fundamentally good guys struggling with thwarted ambitions and paralyzing uncertainty is
evident in the strength and intelligence with which she endows them. ( When Jack recklessly threatens to kill himself and his
indifferent ex-spouse, Bill reminds him that this will make orphans of his children. How often do you hear LOGIC like that from
dramatis personae nowadays? )
Keith Kupferer and Timothy Gregory like their characters, too. Kupferer has built his reputation on playing the Jacks of the world,
but discovers unsuspected emotions beneath the familiar mannerisms, so that when Jack's boisterous bluff finally breaks, it is a
moment to break our hearts. No less poignant is Gregory's portrayal of Bill, whose regret is that he is no longer the husband that the
woman he loves married. Director Rick Snyder paces the 90 minutes of dialogue with never a misstep, its physical business as
devoid of swagger as a pair of comfortable shoes and phrasing bare of treadwater redundancy even during a long good news-bad
news monologue that would stagger a less capable ensemble than that mustered for this too-brief production at the Steppenwolf
Garage.