Playwright: John Green
At: Red Hen Productions, 5123 N. Clark
Phone: ( 773 ) 728-0599
Runs through: April 27
At the end of Twilight Serenade, a play that wants to confront the effect of a loved ones' death on a family, I had one thought: 'So what?' Now before you think that makes me a cold-hearted bastard, who yawns in the face of loss, think again. My reaction was not based on a cold heart, but on the playwright's inability to convince me of the reality of the world he's created, and his failure to give me characters for whom I could care.
In the press materials, it says that the play was originally a 10-minute piece. I think part of the problem is that Twilight Serenade is still a 10-minute piece, padded out to fill a little over an hour of actual stage time. Its story, about the death of David, husband to Ruby, father to Molly, father-in-law to Tom, and brother to Virgie, wants to capture how his death affected the different members of the family, depending on the kind of relationship each had with him. Green moves us effortlessly out of the past and present, using the mostly silent figure of David ( John Gawlik ) , who appears in 40s attire, as a young man. Green has a fluid hand with dialogue, and demonstrates his characters' foibles and strengths through what they say to each other … in a mostly natural way. His scenes with the bickering sisters-in-law, Ruby ( a sympathetic turn by Rachel Stephens ) and Virgie ( Mary Siebel, who knows how to wield a cane and a blisteringly funny sharp tongue ) are delightful.
But the play falters. For one thing, Green has used too much extraneous detail to pad it out. A scene with Molly in a grocery store as she laboriously picks out cards earns a chuckle, but it doesn't do much to progress the story. Virgie's loss of her sight in an eye adds little. And Tom's narration, with its asides about his real estate development business, leads us away from what the play is about, rather than getting to its heart. Green would have been better off using this extra time to explore and explain. Why, for example, is daughter Molly ( Anne Jacques ) compelled to run away to the mountains of Colorado after her father's death? Granted, the loss of a parent can be traumatic, but Molly's reaction is extreme. We need to see why it was extreme … and not told vaguely that she needed time alone. Her admission that it brought out a fear of losing her own husband comes too late and too conveniently.
One other flaw is that the play moves gracelessly through time, with the worst example being near the end, when Green has Tom say, 'It's now two years later' and then launches into a scene to show how the little bereft family has healed.
Twilight Serenade needs more immediacy, providing us with a reason to care beyond a death in the family. That alone isn't enough. Red Hen gives a competent production here ( under the direction of Ted Hoerl ) , but competency isn't enough to bring to life a deeply flawed work, one that still needs to somehow make us feel something.
