There are many reasons why a play might fail. In fact, there are so many reasons, it often seems a miracle that so much quality theatre happens in Chicago. But every once in a while, through an unfortunate convergence of wrong people on the wrong project, several failings converge on one production.

Safe, receiving its Midwest premiere from the International Theatre of Chicago, sadly, is such a convergence. First, the script, from Anthony Ruivivar (a featured actor on the Third Watch television series) and Tony Glazer (one of the Third Watch staff writers) brims over with problems. Like a modern No Exit, five characters are trapped in a bank vault while a robbery, and possibly a police standoff, goes on outside. Quickly, the power dynamics within the group lead to shifting alliances, power grabs and, ultimately, violence.

Unfortunately, Safe largely depends on the veracity of one character. Truss (Hank Hilbert) quickly seizes control of the group with his paranoid speculations on the situation outside of the vault. For the rest of the play to pack any impact, we have to buy that three reasonable human beings (excluding the security guard with a head wound who, presumably, isn’t in any shape for critical thinking) quickly come to accept one man’s vision of their situation to the exclusion of all other (often more reasonable) points of view. Furthermore, the text doesn’t give Truss much help as his “logical” explanations don’t really stand up to any kind of serious scrutiny. If that key actor can’t readily convince the audience and his vault-mates of his beliefs, then the rest of the play goes nowhere.

Hilbert does his best, but it’s an uphill fight against a very flawed text. He makes a number of obvious choices, too quickly revealing to the audience that Truss is a nut job. In fact, most of the actors here fall into the script’s numerous traps—playing state instead of action, going straight for objectives when a curve is necessary, repeating beats over and over. It appears that director Dale Goulding didn’t offer much guidance to his struggling cast.

It’s possible that Safe wouldn’t succeed under any circumstances, but the careful balancing of characters needed to give it a shot never happens here. Ruivivar and Glazer shoot pretty clearly for a War on Terror metaphor that could have been interesting, but their story just doesn’t hold. Only a superb production could save this script, but Goulding’s attempt falls far short.

Safe, International Theatre of Chicago

Chris Jones, Tribune—“It’s always dangerous to include the line ‘How long do you think we’ll be stuck in here?’ in a play, especially when the material is as weak and sloppy as Anthony Ruivivar and Tony Glazer’s clunking drama Safe. The International Theatre of Chicago is giving this amateurish piece of nonsense an amateurish Midwest premiere that the region surely could have lived without. The answer—should you be unfortunate enough to attend—is 90 minutes. A seemingly endless 90 minutes.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Thirty minutes into the 90-minute travesty of a play titled Safe, it became clear that there was no hope for things to get better and, impossible as it might seem, that things might actually be headed from dreadful to even worse. And so, because there are indeed moments when it is essential to vote with one’s feet, I slipped out the back of the third-floor studio at the Athenaeum Theatre on Monday night and took a big breath of the late summer air.”

Barbara Vitello, Daily Herald—“Despite its capable cast, crisp direction and effectively minimalist set bathed in an institutional green hue, Safe emerges as a less-than-gripping piece of theater thanks to an underwhelming script hampered by plot holes, slight humor, and stock characters mouthing sociopolitical clichés and pop-culture quips… Although Ruivivar and Glazer rely heavily on TV conventions, they deserve credit for casting a critical eye on how people respond to a crisis. Not everyone responds in love-thy-neighbor fashion. Not everyone emerges unscathed. Safe makes that abundantly clear.”

Justin Hayford, Reader—“Playwrights Anthony Ruivivar (an actor on NBC’s ‘Third Watch’) and Tony Glazer (a writer on the same show) offer an intriguing premise in their 2003 off-Broadway play. Three bank employees and two customers are locked in a room-size safe after a robbery—along with a huge stash of money. Was there really a robbery? Is one of the victims actually the perpetrator? Unfortunately, the premise is all that’s interesting. The playwrights strive to examine human nature at its worst, but for 90 minutes their script lurches from cliche (‘We’re running out of air!’) to improbability (it’s 15 minutes before the characters remember they have cell phones)—problems exacerbated by the generally self-conscious, uncertain performances from director Dale Goulding’s cast.”

Nina Metz, New City—“International Theatre of Chicago’s production of Safe, by Anthony Ruivivar and Tony Glazer—an actor and writer on the NBC series “Third Watch,” respectively—is a version of No Exit, minus Sartre’s exceedingly dark and trenchant wit… It’s like being locked up in a room full of Larry Davids, which sounds more amusing than it actually is. One man is killed by his fellow hostages; another is chained up and left for bait. Blood on his hands, the ringleader announces, ‘What happens in the safe stays here,’ to which you, the audience member, can only think, ‘Yes, just like Vegas.’ But whereas Sartre was deeply cynical and pithy about the hellishness of others, the playwrights here simply use it as an excuse for gags, many of which fall flat despite the best efforts of director Dale Goulding and the cast.”

Lawrence Bommer, Free Press—“Thanks to Dale Goulding’s skittish staging of this 90-minute endurance test, the actors perform as if they really think they’re under surveillance cameras. Whatever gallows humor the authors intended is lost to pointless realism and stiff blocking. When Safe isn’t boring, it’s not believable. Not to recommend it for a moment but it’s amazing how the truly bogus can be strangely fascinating. The worst show of the year took nine months to gestate.”

Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“The authors’ backgrounds in series television may account for their story’s resemblance to a 25-minute telescript stretched to feature-length. The members of their microcosmic American society must be alternately terrified and resigned without a hint of subtext to drive their progress. And under Dale Goulding’s usually capable direction, the young actors plunge headlong into their roles with a noisy enthusiasm that leaves them no recourse after the first five minutes but to tread water until the authors spring their punch line. Ruivivar and Glazer’s point—that blind fear is our worst enemy—is a valid, if hardly original, one. Their error lies in the conviction that only by forcing us to endure unpardonable amounts of patent idiocy can they guarantee that we will recognize the wisdom of their caveat on jumping to conclusions based on false assumptions.”

Copenhagen, TimeLine Theatre Company

Chris Jones, Tribune—“[Director Lou] Contey smartly sticks the play in a shrewd set from Brian Sidney Bembridge that mimics a Germanic lecture theater, while still suggesting Bohr’s Copenhagen home. And it’s an uncommonly well-paced and visually rich show, with three quite credible and admirably complex central performances. Copenhagen is a fiendishly difficult text, and I wouldn’t claim that all its richness is evoked in this very solid, rather than revelatory, production—some sections of the show are hesitant and others are both rushed and flat. The action needs ratcheting up in places—given that the future of physics and the fate of the world are both at stake. But, especially if you’ve never seen Copenhagen in its definitive London or Broadway incarnations, this is an intimate, affordable and worthwhile revival with emotional resonance and considerable physical oomph.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“The multilayered Copenhagen is a brilliant and demanding play, as well as an infuriating one. And whatever arguments you might want to pick with the playwright, it is receiving a first-class rendering here. Director Louis Contey has assembled three of the theater’s most distinguished “regulars”—Terry Hamilton, P.J. Powers and Isabel Liss—and set them to work at a terrific clip as they argue about everything from nuclear reactions and the Uncertainty Principle to national loyalties and personal passions.”

Scott C. Morgan, Daily Herald—“Under the skilled direction of Louis Contey, actors Terry Hamilton (Bohr), PJ Powers (Heisenberg) and Isabel Liss (Margrethe) each believably inhabit their roles as snugly as Alex Meadow’s smart 1940s period costumes. Alternating between guarded suspicion to all-out embracing joy, the cast easily navigates the relationship dynamics and debating styles of each character… The only potential problem with TimeLine’s Copenhagen might be audiences who are unprepared to take in such a sophisticated and challenging work. Unlike other plays, Copenhagen almost requires a mandatory dose of caffeine just to make sure the mind is fully energized for such a rigorous and richly rewarding workout.”

Justin Hayford, Reader—“British playwright Michael Frayn’s fact-based but speculative drama focuses on two Nobel-winning atomic physicists, Denmark’s Niels Bohr and Germany’s Werner Heisenberg—longtime friends who found themselves on opposite sides during World War II over the topic of atomic-weapons research. Frayn plays fast and loose with history, diffusing tension and rendering the characters implausible. Director Louis Contey’s production is handsome and grounded, but it only comes to life when the play does.”

John Beer, New City—“Terry Hamilton’s Bohr, alternately gruff and generous, and Isabel Liss’s suspicious Margarethe bring Frayn’s dizzying reimaginations of the trio’s various encounters to life with vivid precision. As Heisenberg, Terry Hamilton is faced with an almost impossible challenge, playing continual variations on an enigma, and while he handles his task deftly, he remains as evasive toward the audience as toward himself. Frayn’s play, like Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, attempts to find a dramatic form for the epistemological conundrums of the most difficult modern thought; TimeLine has staged a solid version, with occasional missteps, of this important contemporary work.”

Rick Reed, Windy City—“Although it may appear on the surface that Copenhagen would have little to offer in the way of entertainment (albeit a lot to offer in terms of thought provocation and historical significance), it manages to captivate and make you want more, putting you, perhaps, in Frayn’s shoes when he first became interested in the mysterious meeting between the two men and what they said and became inspired to write his play. It doesn’t hurt that Contey works with an unmatched thespian trio, who know how to make these historical figures not only captivating, but sympathetic.”

Quote of the Fortnight

“Just because a playwright is famous and/or successful doesn’t mean that every piece of their work is worthy of a mounting.”—Venus Zarris reviewing The Journeymen’s production of The Cryptogram in Gay Chicago,