Playwright: Claudia Allen
At: Victory Gardens, 2257 N. Lincoln
Phone: (773) 871-3000
Runs through: May 4
I may have stumbled across a time conundrum this past Sunday and Monday. Maybe someone can tell me how 90 minutes can pass more slowly than three hours. On Sunday, I saw Chicago Shakespeare's lovely, spirited production of The Winter's Tale (clocking in at a little more than three hours, with intermission), and on Monday, I suffered through Claudia Allen's banal, trite, and stale world premiere play, Unspoken Prayers, which ran only an hour and a half, without an intermission.
Let me try to explain it, as best I can, in non-scientific terms. Here's why Unspoken Prayers seemed to take up more of my life than The Winter's Tale: Allen's play uses wooden, flat, one-dimensional characters who serve to inspire only boredom rather than sympathy, interest, or even curiosity. Allen's themes, mostly having to do with the morality of the death penalty, and how race plays a major role in the American judicial system, are the kinds of things we've heard spoken about more eloquently and with more artistry for a long time. Where is the playwright's take? Is she simply a sponge, regurgitating the same tired arguments and positions we've heard for years? Lastly Unspoken Prayers fails to tell a compelling story; it's an annoying collection of vignettes that attempts, and fails, to dramatize the aftermath of a teenage girl's murder on those that survive her. The piece is oddly lifeless and devoid of emotion or tension. One would think that the subject matter alone would be enough to make Unspoken Prayers interesting in a kind of docudrama sort of way. But Allen, and director Dennis Zacek, who exhibits extremely leaden pacing, seem to have consciously strived to squeeze any suspense out of the production. I can't be sure if the performances here, headlined by former All My Children soap star, Taylor Miller (who played Nina Cortlandt for a decade), are just uninspired or if the actors just couldn't do much with this implausible jumble of clichés and contrivances.
The only character in the show with any life comes late with Velma Austin's portrayal of a death-row mother whom Miller's character meets at the jail where her daughter's killer is imprisoned.
Austin masterfully brings out the woman's tired acceptance of the plight of the poor and the downtrodden.
Unspoken Prayers needs several things to make it a success: a credible playwriting voice imbued with authority, an original take on its theme, more energetic pacing, and plotting that underscores the controversy and emotion this play should have, and doesn't.
