11-21-08
Bustin' Out of the Hell is a Factory Show
For theatregoers who have experienced Factory’s work in the past, this is all that need be said. Factory has earned its reputation by putting up original shows that tend to be loud, a little bit crass, and feature humor that ranges from the groan-inducing to the bizarre. It’s nothing if not uneven and definitely not for everyone. But if you enjoy Factory’s particular brand of humor, then their current endeavor will definitely please.
Bustin’ Out Of The Hell tells the story of Lee, an average guy who references movies a little too often and has trouble opening up emotionally to his girlfriend. He thinks he has all the time in the world, but a fatal car accident proves him wrong. Thereafter he goes to the afterlife, only to discover that he’s a “borderliner,” which means he’s not a slam-dunk for heaven or hell. But when his sins and good deeds are plugged into the Excel spreadsheet they use to decide the hard cases, he comes up short and it’s off to the seven circles (apparently Dante exaggerated). There, he’s forced to complete pointless tasks, listen to really bad music and occasionally air guitar to songs with no guitar line. This proves intolerable, so he, along with three other borderliners, decide to break out.
From apostles telling jokes (silly but fun) to Jesus’ ever-changing t-shirts (very funny) the humor is everything but subtle. The acting varies all over the map. Ryan Bollettino gives the strongest performance of the evening as everyone’s favorite IT guy, Jesus. Paul Metreyeon’s Lee is decent as the show’s everyman. The performances get progressively broader from there.
For me, at least, the show started strong, but the overall volume level, which pretty much goes to 11 and stays there, wore on me as things went along. Fortunately, Bustin’ Out Of The Hell only lasts 90 minutes, which is about the maximum lifespan for this kind of show. And I suspect, if you’ve had a few beers, the volume would matter less and the jokes would be funnier. So if you like your humor broad and quick, have a couple of drinks and head over to Bustin’ Out Of The Hell. And if you’re looking for subtlety, you’d better go elsewhere.
Bustin’ Out Of The Hell, Factory Theater
Laura Molzahn, Reader—“The script’s got plenty of pop-culture erudition, but Oken takes a machine-gun approach to comedy, firing off scores of jokes in the apparent hope that a few will hit their target. And that’s what happens: some hits, some misses, lots lost in the fray. With so little room for comic timing, director Eric Thomas Roach resorts to upping the volume. Ouch.”
Kris Vire, Time Out—“There are solid laughs to be had in Oken’s tale, in which the afterlife unaccountably resembles the TV shows of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s…The quick-cut, one-liner and two-liner joke format of Oken’s script directly echoes Laugh-In, and the idea of ubiquitous game-show panelist and Fried Green Tomatoes author Fannie Flagg as chief demon of hell (a deliciously chilling turn by Chelsea Paice) is amusing as a stand-alone joke. That’s kind of the problem: Oken’s jokes keep standing alone…As fun as it is to watch the Factory tickling itself, we can’t help thinking casual theatergoers might be perplexed.”
A House With No Walls, TimeLine Theatre Company
Chris Jones, Tribune—“[T]his is…one of those overly earnest, predictable and ponderous plays where characters are constantly asserting their positions, rather than talking like real people. [Playwright Thomas] Gibbons has made some admirable concessions toward balance. But you still feel that Cadence is set up by the play to question her position. It’s as if the playwright so badly wants us to like her, he undermines her fire. And especially in this production, you can see the end of her personal crisis right from the start.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“A House Without Walls, now in a solid TimeLine Theatre production directed by Louis Contey, is not about an election campaign. But it is deeply political as it poses such questions as: Who owns history? Can a historian write honestly about a culture not his or her own? Can an ‘outsider’ perhaps say things that someone who is part of that culture might be intimidated about saying? And when does history become a self-defeating crutch?”
Zac Thompson, Reader—“A House With No Walls is engrossing because of its willingness to tackle head-on one of the biggest elephants in the room of American culture. But Cadence and Salif come across as less interesting than the topic, because their engagement with the history of slavery and racism remains rhetorical. Louis Contey’s staging for TimeLine Theatre Company is sensible in almost every regard. The unfinished look of Collette Pollard’s functional, concrete-gray set suggests both a construction site and ruins, and Contey orchestrates collisions between the 21st- and 18th-century stories effectively and without visual clutter.”
Monica Westin, New City—“What dazzles about this show is its raw intelligence, visible in every aspect of the production, from the artful depiction of the presence and absence of history, through shadows, literal projections and echoing of lines from past to present; to playing with the convention of the historical reenactment business; to the participation in and then deconstruction of political speech codes. The actors understand that to keep up, they have to be as complex and shifting as the rest, showing admirable restraint, and even the set, resembling the blueprints and foundation of a house, is a thought-provoking addition to the show.”
Brian Nemtusak, Time Out—“Gibbons’s fact-based tale, the third in his ‘race’ trilogy, concerns the controversy over whether (and how) a soon-to-open Philadelphia museum on the site of Washington’s presidential digs will acknowledge the former ‘servants’ quarters.’…Artfully shifting from this scenario to the escape of one of Washington’s slaves, Oney Judge, 200 years earlier, the script miraculously avoids caricature, preachiness, pedagogy or sentiment, allowing for the possibility of moving on from the past without pretending it doesn’t still color the present.”
Catey Sullivan, Windy City—“Directed by Louis Contey, the issues in Gibbons’ work don’t overwhelm the story or sink the dialogue. Instead, a top-drawer ensemble navigates multiple centuries and dueling points of view in disparate worlds that range from the rarefied halls of academia to raucous rallies on National Park sites. Moreover, the play comes filtered through an engrossing, real-life contemporary context. Gibbons based the piece on a series of events that started in 2000, when the National Parks Service began construction on the multi-million dollar Liberty Bell Center. The planned shrine to liberty was mere feet from the spot where Washington had his slave quarters.”
Seven Days, Steep Theatre Company
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Given the kind of attention a new theater space can garner, what could possibly have possessed Steep to have chosen such a disastrous, untested play as Egan Reich’s Seven Days as the opener? This wannabe mythic American drama, poorly directed by Jim Poole, is among the most turgid, pretentious, incomprehensible dramas I’ve ever encountered. It is so bad that it verges on parody, though clearly it is meant to be one of those deadly serious (if wholly predictable) indictments of how this country was born out of corruption, violence and every manner of ruthlessness.”
Kerry Reid, Reader—“Reich isn’t a bad writer—there are nuggets of cutting dialogue embedded in the dramaturgical silt—but this script badly needs an editor. And the B-movie pseudo-solemnity of his tale, set in an Old West frontier town teeming with mysterious folks on the edge of apparent environmental apocalypse and totalitarianism, occasionally feels lifted from Michael Crichton’s Westworld. Jim Poole’s earnest but somewhat clunky staging leaves the Steep regulars straining to deliver credible performances.”
Christopher Shea, Time Out—“Reich’s keen eye for gorgeous language and stage fantasy calls to mind Tony Kushner with a shot of testosterone. But his piece lacks an underlying structure to drive his highfalutin stylings forward. Grandiloquence is always nice, but it’s hard to individuate characters who all speak in identically ostentatious tones… Steep’s immensely talented ensemble performs with bluster. But Reich wrote his script for these actors, and the process appears to have taken a toll. Stunning chemistry between two actors in the rehearsal room does not a fantastic subplot make: Reich seemingly develops gratuitous plotlines and relationships merely to display his actors’ formidable skills.”
Jonathan Abarbanel, Windy City—“I’ve sat through four-hour plays that seemed to last just minutes, and one-hour plays that felt like forever. At two and a half hours, Seven Days was eternity in purgatory. It was a good idea for Steep Theatre to celebrate its new theater space (and a fine space it will be once the paint fumes clear, with 130 seats and a gracious lobby) with a big world-premiere play by a company member. But Seven Days is impenetrable, episodic and pretentiously metaphoric. Its selection is unfathomable to me, and I’m a really smart guy with a lot of new-play expertise. It’s not helpful that the play’s most indelible images are of women gratuitously imprisoned and beaten.”
The Thugs, Profiles Theatre
Kerry Reid, Tribune—“Bock, a rising national talent who won an Obie for this show in 2006 and has been strangely absent from Chicago stages, creates a taut and amusing balance between the everyday existential dread of pointless labor and the horrors of the nameless world outside the office doors. Some of the bits feel warmed over, but he gets the elliptical dialogue and overall ennui of an endless day at the office. Joe Jahraus’ production includes stellar performances from Caroline Dodge Latta’s tremulous but tyrannical office vet Mercedes to Greta Honold’s blissfully underachieving Daphne, who likes everything about working except the work.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“[F]or anyone who has served time as a temporary office worker, or toiled at tedious clerical tasks in a law firm, there will be a sense of instant, blackly comic recognition in the circle of interpersonal hell depicted in The Thugs, Adam Bock’s quirky little play about the fear and loathing and terror found in the contemporary workplace (and beyond). This tight, tense, hour long drama—now in its Midwest premiere by Profiles Theatre, where it will run in repertory with Jason Wells’ Men of Tortuga, a more macho take on office life—has been ideally cast and directed by Joe Jahraus.”
Tony Adler, Reader—“Diane runs a little white-collar sweatshop where she oversees six temps—marginal personalities all—as they do something involving highlighters and staples to stacks of legal documents. Tightly wound herself, she does pretty much everything you shouldn’t do if you want to maintain morale and productivity—play favorites, designate scapegoats, infantilize staff—and more, and worse. When rumors surface about murders in the building, her dysfunctional little subculture implodes. Joe Jahraus’s uneven staging can get too nuanced for its own good, losing its dramatic arc in actorly tics. Still, it creeps up on you as the thugs make themselves known and the victims pile up.”
Lisa Buscani, New City—“The top-notch cast makes the Mametesque dialogue sound as natural as breathing, and capably man-handles the script’s helter-skelter rhythms. Standouts include Caroline Dodge Latta as the office’s sad-sack pariah/victim; Bob Pries as the ebullient gossip-monger and Greta Honold as the cheerful do-nothing who must deal with a very real conflict at home.”
Kris Vire, Time Out—“Jahraus’s tightly choreographed direction allows just the right amount of quirk to seep through the seams, particularly in the performances of Caroline Dodge Latta as a trying-too-hard eccentric and Bob Pries as the over-insinuating office gay. But there’s more going on beneath the surface of this unexpectedly deep 55-minute play, and Bock smartly chooses not to reveal everything.”
Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“Nothing could be easier than to play this malaise for laughs—ho-ho-ho, look at these scaredy-cats—but director Joe Jahraus and the tightly integrated cast assembled for this Profiles Theatre production instead embrace the author’s icily somber exploration of a microcosmic society on the edge of breakdown, taking full advantage of their circumscribed space and our confinement therein. When Bock finally permits his helpless denizens a small remedy for their abject terror, they may be too bewildered to wholly understand its therapeutic purpose—but we do, and the magnitude of our relief reflects just how skillfully we have absorbed his cautionary lesson.”
Quote of the Fortnight:
“I know it’s a ridiculously self-evident thing to say, but listening to Shakespeare’s language in this context made me realize what an amazingly good writer he was.”—Tony Adler in his review of SITI Company’s Radio Macbeth at Court Theatre in the Reader.