CC Klinger gives an arresting performance in Landford Wilson’s The Moonshot Tape, part of Eclipse’s “Sextet.”

They’re too short to stand on their own in most settings, so one must offer several of them to make up a reasonable evening of theatre. They don’t always represent the best work of the playwright, often existing as experiments in form or character. And finally, as an evening of theatre, they lack the narrative through-line of a regular script.

Eclipse Theatre Company’s evening of six Lanford Wilson one-acts suffers from all of these problems at one point or another. The first act in particular proves far weaker than the second. The opening piece, Ikke, Ikke, Nye, Nye, Nye offers a highly experimental look at an evening tryst. It is significantly different in tone from the rest of the evening, and the cast never quite seems comfortable with the piece’s theatricality. Marzena Bukowska, particularly, pushes too hard.

It’s followed by Days Ahead, a one-man monologue, featuring Gregory Hardigan as an odd man visiting the wife he apparently had walled up in an old apartment. Unfortunately, Hardigan and director Thomas Jones don’t create enough of an arc for the piece, and it’s not consistently interesting.

The final piece of the first act, The Madness of Lady Bright tells the story of an aging queen whose life full of one-night stands has left him without any companion but the signatures on his walls. Steven Fedoruk plays the stereotype a bit too strongly, but this piece still resonates emotionally.

It’s not until the second act that the audience gets a true sense of Wilson’s writing. Sextet (Yes) essentially features six people speaking to the audience of their intertwining (and incestuous) history. Don Bender and John Fenner Mays are particularly effective as brothers whose lives have taken different paths. Director Cecilie D. Keenan does a nice job of illuminating interrelationships subtly, yet clearly.

The Moonshot Tape comes from much later in Wilson’s career than anything else in the evening and it shows—offering some of the strongest writing of the evening. CeCe Klinger plays a writer returned to her hometown. In her monologue interview with an unseen teenage journalist she goes deeper into her family history then she probably intended. One of the only pieces in the evening that will take the audience by surprise, this one-act proves completely arresting.

Finally, the evening ends with This Is The Rill Speaking, Lanford Wilson’s answer to Our Town. This plotless piece depicts a number of small town residents somewhere in the Ozarks. Featuring some of the evening’s best acting, director Jeremy Wechsler effectively evokes a day in the town’s life that might have come directly out of Lanford Wilson’s own childhood.

Unfortunately, as an evening, Sextet simply runs too long (over two hours and 30 minutes) and proves too uneven to consistently hold an audience’s interest. Tightened to four pieces, this might have offered an interesting exploration of Wilson’s lesser known work. As it is, the weaker pieces water down the evening, reducing the audience’s enjoyment of his better work.

Sextet: An Evening of One-Acts—Eclipse Theatre Company

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“This encyclopedic program also happens to be the centerpiece of Eclipse’s ongoing Lanford Wilson marathon (the theater devotes a complete season to the work of a single playwright) that began with The Rimers of Eldritch and will continue this fall with Talley & Son. But by bundling together so many pieces in a single evening—with the talents of six different directors and 12 excellent actors on display—Eclipse may be giving us too much of a sometimes fascinating, sometimes trying thing.”

Kelly Kleiman, Reader—“The Eclipse Theatre Company’s 2005 season of Wilson plays continues with a program of early short works. Buried among these cliched writing exercises presented as overwrought acting exercises is the brilliant The Moonshot Tape. CeCe Klinger gives a masterful performance, and Steve Scott directs with the delicacy necessary to address the well-worn subject of sexual abuse. The other five plays, which all feature adolescent sniggering about sex, range from dreadful to mediocre.”

Lawrence Bommer, Free Press—“The best of the bunch, warmly wrought by Steve Scott, is CeCe Klinger’s portrayal of a short story writer returning to her miserable Missouri roots in The Moonshot Tape. Interviewed by an unseen high school reporter, she unleashes a wrenching memory of abuse and revenge that roots the urge to write fiction in an equal drive to improve on reality. In this one-act, finally more is at stake than stylistic showing off.”

Tim Sauers, Gay Chicago—“With the exception of one or two pieces, it’s questionable why the company felt itself inclined to produce such works that have not endured the test of time… Other than theatre students or historians, no one would be much interested in experiencing them, as there’s little emotional or intellectual substance to captivate the general theatre going public. Unappealing, overwrought, larger-than-life and louder than need be performances muddle rather than clarify the playwright’s intent.”

The Cryptogram—The Journeymen

Justin Hayford, Reader—“In the demanding central role, 14-year-old Jack Donahue delivers a meticulous, stone-faced performance that builds with such measured intensity it becomes almost too painful to watch. The adult actors in this Journeymen production—Shannon O’Neill as John’s beleaguered mother and Daniel E. Brennan as her morally bankrupt childhood friend, Del—need the better part of a half hour in the play’s tricky first scene to reach Donahue’s level of intensity. Once they do, Frank Pullen’s focused production packs a debilitating wallop.”

Lawrence Bommer, Free Press—“In The Journeymen’s earnest but still tentative production the payoff comes in the final scene. It works because for an hour before, the actors both prepare us for and surprise us with a lacerating twist. It especially stings because Shannon O’Neil’s anguished Donny is a woman eaten out by more than three misfortunes. At the end of her tether, she won’t endure Del’s bromides and John’s cascading questions and demands. She just snaps.”

Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“Under the always-capable direction of Frank Pullen, the Journeymen actors likewise struggle to impose coherence on their painfully elliptical dialogue, adopting eccentric phrasing and anachronistic pronunciations (who in 1959 says, “curséd”—or “cursed,” for that matter?). The results make for well-wrought subtextual dynamics and baroque vocal harmonies, while the collectively credited scenic design uses every inch of the Stage Left space to conjure a preternaturally placid world seething with repressed turbulence. But Mamet’s abortive attempt at minimalism ultimately proves as enigmatic to us as to its characters.”

Like a Dog on Linoleum—Bailiwick Repertory

Chris Jones, Tribune—“Although he’s now at the Bailiwick Arts Center, this is a production with serious New York ambitions. To realize those ambitions, it will need a lot more work. Pushing two hours, the show is at least 20 minutes too long. It needs a lot more acting and a lot less narrating—[playwright and performer Leslie] Jordan is a formidable mimic who can play the butchest southern sheriff, when the moment calls. Those fabulously wrought characters are what make this show different and fun. But Jordan often seems fearful of fully expressing them… But if Jordan can resist the easy laughs and the warm praise of the choir just a little, and if he can go back to work and make more sense of his singular life, he’ll have a distinctive and rather haunting little show. Even though prices are high, it’s already well worth seeing.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“On top of it all, Jordan is an engaging, stylish, caustically funny writer. And though it is always difficult to tell just what the director of a one-man show has contributed to the process, David Galligan seems to have carefully calibrated the actor’s almost terrifyingly manic energy. There are moments when you fear for Jordan’s life here. And when he describes the horrors of dodgeball as they apply to a small, gay boy in a physical education class, there are moments when he almost seems to become that battered ball, as well as being terrorized by it.”

Jack Helbig, Reader—“TV actor Leslie Jordan’s autobiographical solo show is very so-so, but Jordan can make even so-so material hilarious. He talks about his Tennessee childhood; his extended adolescence in New York, LA, and points in between; his wild, promiscuous sex life; and his many drug and alcohol problems. The stories are often funny, but they lack focus and just don’t build. At the end Jordan tries to tie it all together with talk about sobriety and spirituality, but the attempt feels forced and hollow.”

Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“But so what if the events in his agenda often line up a bit TOO neatly? If many of his acquaintances conform to mythic archetypes popularized in regional literature? If his attempts at—yawn—contemporary relevance seem tacked on? Jordon hails from a culture where people engage in florid expressions such as “[he] couldn’t catch a fat man running up a hill” and “I stuck out like a rat turd on rye.” Jordan is also sufficiently agile, physically, to suggest the body language of his various personae—his illustration of dissimilar dance-styles of disco-habitués is especially accurate, as is his brief demonstration of how he butched up real nice for a job in an army-recruiting ad. And in the end, his yarn, however dubious its veracity, makes for a nostalgic celebration of steel-magnolia courage. Who knows? Some of it might even be true.”

Quote of the Fortnight

“The play, in short, has the critic by the private parts.”—Lawrence Bommer reviewing Drury Lane Oakbrook’s production of Sherlock’s Last Case in the Free Press.

Correction

In the August 19 issue, I inadvertantly listed a quote from Jack Helbig's Reader review of Comedy of Errors at Oak Park Festival Theatre under the heading for Chicago Shakespeare's Short Shakespeare production of Comedy of Errors. My apologies for the error.