Playwright: Lee Scheier
At: Mercury Theater, 3745 N. Southport
Contact: ( 773 ) 325-1700; $39.50 - $46.50
Runs through: Dec. 10
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
For the 17 years I've been reviewing theater, I've stuck by a single, incontrovertible rule: If, and only if, one becomes both violently and noticeably ill between parts one and two is it OK to leave at intermission. As we say on the Jeff Committee, if you have to leave a show before it's over, you damn well better be dead.
And yet there I was, walking out after the first half of Transference. I was alive, but dead certain that life is too short, even for a theater critic, to sit through some things. Never say never.
Transference is worse than train-wreck bad—it's inconsequentially bad. It's a waste of time, money and actors. It's the kind of show that makes one marvel, for about a second, at the lower-than-the-bottom-of-your-shoe opinion its creators/producers must have of audiences. When the marvel factor wears off—how dumb do people think the ticket-buying public is?—disgust sets in. If you've got an opinion this low of your audience, you don't deserve an audience.
Dumb comedies are one thing; there's a place for brainless shenanigans. Playwright Lee Scheier's Transference isn't dumb; it's moronic and, worse than that, it doesn't contain a word of even remotely honest dialogue. Directed by Jeff Lee, Transference is lazy, shrill and blatantly artless. Its intentions have nothing to do with storytelling or even spectacle and everything to do with separating suckers from their money.
Here's the premise: Attorney Harold Feldman thinks he's a whippet. In the middle of the night, he announces this to his wife Miriam, and then starts barking. Miriam becomes upset. Laughing yet?
OK, that's unfair—Just about anything, presumably even a man who thinks he's a dog, can be funny in the right context. But Scheier gives us no context. Here we are in the first scene, watching an actor down n all fours, snuffling the floor and pretending to pee by raising his leg. It's not humorous. It is cringe-inducing.
The set's twin beds and the pajamas and nightgown ensembles that the Feldmans sport make one think Scheier was aiming for some sort of Rob-and-Laura Petrie sitcom mode. He misses. The Dick Van Dyke Show writers, as were many who penned skits for the variety shows of the 1960s and '70s, possessed key ingredients that Sheier is missing—namely, charm and a modicum of humanity.
The other characters are a pair of singles struggling to date and psychiatrist Sidney Levine is practicing a new kind of transference therapy that involves sock puppets, fake noses and wigs.
Maybe Transference turned hilarious in the second act. I'll never know. It's the one show in 17 years that I truly believed didn't deserve a second act.