Rosen hits target with look at Chicago theater
When it comes to Chicago theater, writer/director Eric Rosen knows his subject.
The About Face Theatre co-founder and artistic director, who leaves Chicago next year to take over as artistic director of the Kansas City Repertory Theatre, has long been a fixture here. That explains the fly-on-the-wall sensibility that infuses his "Wedding Play."
Rosen's sharp, affectionate, self-conscious and often frustrating yet spot-on look at Chicago theater is an artfully staged, well-acted, play-within-a-play loosely based on Naguib Mahfouz's "Wedding Song," about a Cairo theater company putting on a play that seems to be its author's murder confession.
Rosen centers his writerly version around promising young playwright Adam (the endearing Sean Cooper as a nebbishy auteur and master manipulator), whose latest hit also plays like a confession. The play unfolds "Rashomon"-style, juxtaposing flashbacks with excerpts from Adam's play and monologues delivered by Adam and his friends. There's embittered ex-lover Tom (a bristling Benjamin Sprunger); gal pal and muse Thalia (a slick, polished Lesley Bevan), a straight actress a little in love with her gay best friend; befuddled father Kenny (a sympathetic, nicely rumpled Craig Spidle); and Jon (a brilliant, quicksilver performance by Joe Dempsey), an ambitious director desperate for a hit that will propel him out of Chicago and into the national spotlight. Each character relates his or her version of the death of Adam's wife Thalia and newborn, a tragedy eerily similar to the one his play depicts.
Therein lies the problem. The play within "Wedding Play" rings false. Hackneyed and overwrought, it's hardly a work to inspire a national buzz around an obscure writer. Although considering how deftly Rosen satirizes what he celebrates, that may be intentional. Still, "Wedding Play" fares best when it examines the petty jealousies, professional insecurities, ambition, fear, passion, devotion, daring and drive that animate life in the theater. That, as much as anything, makes Rosen's parting play, a drama worth seeing.
'Bourbon at the Border'
Pearl Cleage and Eclipse Theatre have served each other well. Cleage, a black writer of endearing characters and gentle humor known for accessible, sentimental dramas featuring strong black women and centered on gender and racial equality, brings diversity to Eclipse's programming.
Eclipse, in turn, showcased some of Chicago's best black actors in fine productions like "Blues for an Alabama Sky," a snapshot of the Harlem Renaissance that earned the company five 2007 Jeff Award Citations, including one for best play. The season concludes with Ron OJ Parson's quiet, competent production of "Bourbon at the Border," a poignant examination of the brutal and bloody legacy of the civil rights movement.
Set in 1995, the play chronicles its lingering effects on one-time activists May (Lynette Mance, who blossoms in the second act) and Charlie (Alfred Wilson, very good as a haunted man struggling with guilt and anger). During college, the couple spent the summer of 1964 in Mississippi registering black voters. Both still carry the physical and emotional scars the Klan and opponents to equality inflicted on them in that Freedom Summer, during which three civil rights workers were tortured and murdered.
Charlie's wounds are most obvious. Suicidal and depressed, he suffers from post-traumatic stress for which he has been repeatedly hospitalized. Upon release from his latest hospital stay, Charlie returns to May and their modest Detroit apartment, where neighbor Rosa (Joslyn Jones as the archetypal sassy black woman) and her affably frugal boyfriend Tyrone (a swaggering comic turn by J.J. McCormick), welcome him home. A marriage rekindled, a new job and May's proposal that they move to Canada seemingly herald better days. But racism, violence and the ghosts of Mississippi haunt them still.
"Bourbon" isn't Cleage's strongest work, Parson's production feels sluggish in spots and Mance in particular seems tentative initially. That said, the show benefits from good casting, understated acting and a moving second-act performance by Mance whose recollection of the events that shattered her innocence but did not destroy her spirit provides an aching reminder that some wounds never heal.