Playwright: Melissa James Gibson. At: Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont. Phone: 773-975-8150; $18-$35. Runs through: March 27
Melissa James Gibson's 2009 comic drama, This, could easily divide people.
Some will find This to be self-consciously contrived in its writing style with characters who fit too easily into sitcom stereotypes. But others will revel in Gibson's adroitly heightened take on overly analytical and diverse New Yorkers coping with infidelity, mourning, parenthood and loneliness.
While watching director Jeremy Wechsler's frequently funny Chicago premiere production of This for Theater Wit, I found myself alternating between these two camps.
On one hand, it's very amusing to watch the self-aware characters spar and debate the semantics of their words and actions. And on the other hand, it can get annoying to see these deliberately chosen characters with dream careers who end up fitting too neatly into Gibson's plotting mechanics.
This focuses mainly on Jane (Rebecca Spence), a published poet and widowed mother. In a pressured moment, Jane has an affair with Tom (John Byrnes), who is the husband of her best friend, Marrell (Lily Mojekwu).
Jane then spend the rest of the play saddled with the guilt of her one-time infidelity, in addition to her parenting difficulties which all get in the way of her having proper time to mourn the recent death of her husband, Roy.
Adding extra humor to the play is attractive French doctor Jean-Pierre (Steve Hadnagy) whom Marrell keeps vicariously trying to push onto Jane, and the moping gay Jewish friend Alan (Mitchell Fain), a professional entertainer who is an expert at mnemonic recall (Alan in particularly feels like a token sitcom character who is only there to sass up the dialogue and be the fact checker on what people actually say).
In the grand scheme of dramatic things, Gibson's glib characters and their dilemmas aren't all that vital and important (which the playwright herself admits in one of Jean-Pierre's backhanded comments near the end of the play). But they're still plenty of fun to be around even if they aren't that real or profound on the surface.
Wechsler's actors do their best, but they aren't fully believable as overly articulate New Yorkers who pick apart everything. But the acting company is more than up to the comic demands that Gibson lays out in her script, and they're lots of fun to watch and observe.
So love This for its heady dialogue mixed with simmering emotion, or hate This for its self-conscious hipster style and plotting. Either way, Theater Wit's This challenges viewers to make up their own minds about the characters debating their own relationships and friendships.
