Playwright: Paul Kampf
At: Breadline Theatre,
1802 W. Berenice Ave.
Phone: (773) 327-6096; $15
Runs through: March 2
It is said that those touched by the gods rarely escape without sustaining damage. This Side Of Angels presents us with the case of Jason Wells, whom we first see blinded and hysterical in the hospital following his flight's fatal crash. Nine hours later, he emerges whole and unchanged—well, maybe not quite.
First, he begins to hear voices and to see his fellow passengers casually going about their business. Then he discovers that he now has the 'healing touch'—supernatural power he soon feels called to use for the benefit of all humanity. The tabloids and 'Miracle Network' TV speculate that he may have been visited by angels. The accident reports insist that there were no survivors of the airline disaster. Jason's pregnant wife insists that his delusions stem from his refusing medication. But his mother, and the landlord in whose building he finds refuge, have seen loved ones return from the dead, and know this world to be wider than our understanding of it.
This material could have been forged into a cozy inspirational fable, or even a quirky 'X-Files' fantasy, if playwright Paul Kampf had trusted the gravity of his subject and the imagination of his audience. Instead, he interrupts his play's action with lofty dialogues between Despair—represented by a doomsaying street prophet—and Hope (whose identity in the corporeal sector is never made clear). Along with apocalyptic newscasts about the Shroud of Turin, and several extraneous scenes in which characters reassert sentiments already articulated previously (though some verbatim redundancy might have been inexperienced actors marking time as they groped for their next line). But so protracted a set-up only renders us too intellectually exhausted to appreciate the satisfactory, if foreseeable, ending.
One of the chief principles in successful salesmanship is knowing when to stop selling and let the customer think the bargain over before consenting to its terms. Breadline's world premiere production has several things to commend it—Michael Rashid's slick but not incompassionate talk-show host, Alzan Pelesic's faithful innkeeper, Jo Jones' wise Mother Wells, Larry Orr's Keeper Of The Light, William Eric Bramlett's haunting sound design. But Kampf's text needs to be whittled down by at least 30 minutes if we are to notice them.