Title: This Wide Night. Playwright: Chloe Moss
At: Shattered Globe Theatre/Interrobang Theatre Project at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.
Tickets: $25-$45; SGTheatre.org . Runs through: Nov. 13
The landlord calls it a "studio"this starkly utilitarian South London apartment no bigger than a motel room and so dimly lit that even a kitchen window looking out on a neighbor's yard can't convince us that it's not a basement. To its current tenant, it might as well be just another in a series of prison cells that she called home until recently. However, her solitude is interrupted one night with the arrival of her just-released former bunkie, eager to fulfill their promise to "keep in touch" on the outside.
This would make the perfect premise for a Pinter play if it weren't for the parolees being femalebut don't expect playwright Chloe Moss to entertain us with tidy parables of broken damsels rescued by knightly therapists, statistic-quoting social workers or abreactive revelations. For young Marie and elderly Lorraine, the past is a fog of fragmented memories; the future is barely a speck on the horizon; and the present is a noisy, hostile, Boschian collage of alien images fraught with menace portending imminent destruction.
So what do castaways adrift in uncharted realms do to resist succumbing to despair? They seek employment within the marginal spheres where their limited options render them vulnerable to exploitation. They struggle with the residual effects of incarceration (impaired recollection of words describing common objects, bodily functions synchronized with institutional hours). They make tentative attempts to reconnect with family members, who may respondor not. They muffle their anxiety with alcohol, antidepressants and such palliatives as are available to citizens of their status. Do they live happily ever after? In a world with no past or future, only an all-too-big present, who can say?
Audiences long accustomed to jailbird-buddy fables featuring male bonding rituals are often unnerved when the gritty squalor associated with the genre is applied to female sensibilities; however, the Shattered Globe Theatre and Interrobang Theatre Project's re-entry into live performance refuses to blunt the impact of its topic with comfortable Hollywood tropes. Moss consulted actual female ex-convicts as consultants in her quest for verisimilitude in her portraiture thereof, and this same dedication to accuracy is likewise apparent in every production aspect. Said aspects include everything from Linda Reiter and Aila Ayilam Peck's fully committed performances under the direction of Georgette Verdin, to a collective display of technical expertise invoking a sordid ambiance so realistic that the incessant rain heard offstage is barely distinguishable from the real-world precipitation on Belmont Avenue.