Playwright: Nicholas Wright
At: Apple Tree Theatre, 595 Elm Place in Highland Park
Phone: ( 847 ) 432-4335; $38
Runs through: March 13
Nicholas Wright's biodrama could easily be subtitled, 'Van Gogh In Love'. The year is 1873 and the future Madman of Arles is a shy youth of 20 working in the family business, sent to England to gain 'experience'. He promptly falls for a girl and takes lodgings at her widowed mother's boarding-house to be near her. But since Miss Eugenie's cultural appreciation extends only so far as scumbling with Sam Plowman—a house-painter with aspirations to an art-school scholarship—Vincent soon finds himself bedding down with his lonely landlady.
As such relationships traditionally do in stories like this, Mme. Loyer bestows on him the maturity, courage and purpose to Follow His Bliss. But then Vincent's snoopy sister pays a visit just long enough to stir up trouble, Eugenie becomes pregnant, Sam sacrifices his career dreams to Do The Decent Thing, and Mme. Loyer is shattered when Vincent takes up, not the brush, but the Bible. All we need now is a sign reading 'to be continued'.
Actor-turned-Director Kurt Johns appears to be so enamored of his roman à cléf, with its titillating hindsights ( 'Look at the stars, Vincent!' ) that he forgets it is also a PLAY. Factors not already contained within the plot—character motives, text interpretation, psychological connections—are all but ignored in this Apple Tree production. As the virginal Vincent, Christopher McLinden is the right age and countenance, but is clearly in over his head. Dialect consultant Linda Gates' Dutch accent never seems integrated with, but rather laid over, passionate declarations delivered in blank-faced, relentlessly contemporary, midwestern-American-acting-class rhythms.
Faring slightly better are Erica Elam as the robust Eugenie and Mattie Hawkinson as the inquisitive Anna Van Gogh, both of whom occasionally rise above their narrative functions. In the role of Mme. Loyer, Lisa Dodson makes a suitably wise and sensual Mrs. Robinson for your run-of-the-mill Victorian genius. But only Gregory Isaac's' compassionate Sam and scenic designer Keith Pitts' cozy country kitchen ever convince us that we are anywhere but at a theatre in 2005, listening to a tidily generic romance in the Thomas Hardy mode.