11-7-08
Tortuga Starts Well, Can't Keep Up Pace
There’s a whole school of theatre that has its roots in the absurdist menace of Beckett and Ionesco. Anonymous dictatorships loom. Faceless bureaucrats obstruct and actual individuals quail. Think Brazil or Pillowman or even Pinter’s The Birthday Party.
Jason Wells’ Men of Tortuga falls firmly into this genre. Set in an upscale conference room in a nameless city, Wells introduces three high-level executives and the professional hit man they’re looking to hire. The target? A “bastard.” That’s all we know.
What follows is probably the best scene in the show as Taggart (an always excellent Darrell W. Cox) goes through the options for the intellectual Tom (Fred Wellisch doing some of his best work), the belligerent Jeff (Todd Lahrman, occasionally overwrought) and the increasingly depressed Kit (the gravelly Jack McCabe).
As things develop, we see Kit meeting with the idealistic Allan (a nicely nuanced Eric Burgher) and gradually having second thoughts ending with his offstage suicide, which puts the conspirators in a difficult spot.
Director Rick Snyder keeps the stakes high and the pace moving, but Wells’ script doesn’t have enough substance to keep everything spinning. About two-thirds of the way through the evening, we begin to feel like we’ve seen all these exchanges before. And Snyder’s one mistake is to allow his cast to gradually substitute volume for stakes. The actors go to the testosterone well a few times too many, and the evening devolves into shouting match after shouting match.
So in part your enjoyment of the evening depends on your tolerance for the ambiguous situation. We never find out why the characters want their opponent dead. We don’t know who they are: government, corporate, what-have-you. And while the performances range from decent to very good, the last third of the show leaves behind any subtlety or nuance. For a show that begins so promisingly, it’s an unfortunate conclusion to the evening.
Men of Tortuga, Profiles Theatre
Chris Jones, Tribune—“Rick Snyder’s well-paced and consistently involving production for Profiles Theatre is decent enough to remind you of Wells’ talents and the play’s taut sophistication. There are some decent performances. But although the play works well in this intimate setting, the new production misses some of the necessary gravitas and magnitude. The action is funnier than before, but not as menacing. And thus the characters lose some of their ability to scare you to death with their combination of corporate familiarity and terrifying amorality.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Wells has crafted a taut, cleverly orchestrated piece about power, personal psychosis, game-playing, morality and the terror of failure. The play’s windup is just about one scene too long. But no one can deny that Men of Tortuga (‘tortuga’ is the Spanish word for ‘tortoise,’ and you can make of that what you will) is a sharp parable for our time.”
Zac Thompson, Reader—“The conspirators’ elaborate plotting and farcical bungling verge on silly, but the conflict between idealism and stubbornness resonates, particularly in this election year. Rick Snyder’s taut production capitalizes on these tensions, especially in the performance of Jack McCabe, who brings a gnarled nobility to the senior conspirator’s recalcitrance.”
Nina Metz, New City—“I liked this play a lot when I saw it at the Steppenwolf First Look Festival a few years ago, and I’m surprised it tookso long for a local company to stage it. Rick Snyder’s production doesn’t live up to my memories—it’s not as crisp as it should be, the tension slackening where it should be tight—but Jason Wells’ script is so good, it’s worth seeing anyway…As things progress, the men lose their cool and scream like the playground bullies that they are. This is where the production loses some of its snap—the men go from zero to all-out shouting way too often for it to be effective.”
Christopher Piatt, Time Out—“Profiles does right by this tangly-but-muscular text. Snyder’s calculated production, perhaps the most waste-free work he’s done, conceals the play’s violence just beneath the surface so that we’ve forgotten it’s there every time it makes a geyserlike reappearance. Of the roundly gifted acting quintet, Cox scores as an all-business hit man with no patience for cronyism, and Wellisch is marvelously vague as a bureaucrat who learns he can’t be the boss and the shape-shifter.”
Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“Men of Tortuga drew considerable attention when it premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre’s First Look workshop in 2005, distinguishing itself from its genre by the author’s concise skewering of fundamentally humane civil servants’ progress from metaphorical warfare to primitive tribalism, but also through his clever employment of stichomythic dialogue delivered at Mametian warp-speed. All of these elements have been retained in the production currently running at Profiles Theatre, where a stop-on-a-dime agile ensemble of actors, under the direction of Rick Snyder, keep us chuckling too comfortably at the testosteronic repartee to think about the disturbing implications of their personae’s descent into savagery.”
After Ashley, Stage Left Theatre
Nina Metz, Tribune—“As satire, After Ashley gives subtlety the big kiss-off and plows forward with the kind of righteous indignation that fails to challenge preconceptions. But in terms of pure rip-roaring entertainment value, the show (in a Chicago premiere at Stage Left Theatre) has the makings of a hit… Gionfriddo piles on the pop culture atrocities like a maniac, but her writing is sharp—a nice acerbic treat for the ear—and director Greg Werstler’s ensemble is clearly having a ball tearing apart every smarmy clich? going.”
Tony Adler, Reader—“Gina Gionfriddo is a TV writer, and her satire on the media’s commoditization of grief has the clean, functional feel of a TV show. Everything—even the surprises—unfolds efficiently, and the characters are neatly tooled to serve the mechanism rather than the other way around. Normally this would drive me crazy. But Gionfriddo’s awfully clever in an acid way, so after a while I stopped worrying, for instance, about the implausible articulateness of teenage Justin—who becomes a celebrity when his mother is murdered—and simply started enjoying it.”
Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City—“This is a play that takes to heart the idea of calling it like it is. And especially when that truth hurts. It is an assault on everything that continues to skew our moral compass, from the media’s commodification of grief, to our implacable fascination with violent sex crimes. Understood… Not that any of this takes away from a truly provocative and funny piece of theater, with writing verve to spare and a production featuring some solid acting turns (as I’ve come to expect from Stage Left). On the contrary, After Ashley is one of those plays you recommend to friends who you know will derive intense pleasure contemplating and debating these same issues.”
Kris Vire, Time Out—“Unfortunately, the characters on whom the playwright takes out her ire are straw men. The characters Gionfriddo admires get more love—the always excellent Plocharczyk shines as the precocious, emotionally fucked Justin, while Ericson and Black both make impressive Chicago debuts (as Justin’s mom and love interest, respectively). But Werstler’s herky-jerky pacing and shoddy production values (the cheap-looking, IKEA-flavored set seems beneath the standards of a company Stage Left’s age) only emphasize the play’s flaws.”
Scott C. Morgan, Windy City—“Stage Left was still able to unleash all the incisive sarcasm and snarky cynicism in Gina Gionfriddo’s award-winning 2005 comedy. Stage Left’s production under Greg Werstler’s direction isn’t perfect, but the hilarious positives more than compensate. In After Ashley, Gionfriddo (a writer for NBC’s Law and Order) blasts away at the entertainment industry that turns real people’s suffering and loss into exploitable entertainment (particularly blubbering talk show guests, the hosts who spew metaphorical platitudes and TV audiences who blindly eat it all up).”
Jesus Hopped the “A” Train, Raven Theatre
Barbara Vitello, Daily Herald—“The acting is laudable. But it’s [Esteban Andres] Cruz and [Bradford] Stevens—the twin pillars who bear the weight of this drama—who most impress. Their richly textured, meticulously crafted performances are absolutely credible and ultimately sobering reflections of the troubled souls that trouble invariably finds.”
Kerry Reid, Reader—“Michael Menendian’s staging doesn’t overcome the implausible aspects of Guirgis’s story—involving a young Puerto Rican, Angel (Esteban Andres Cruz), who shoots a Moonie-esque preacher in the ass after losing his best friend to the cult—and JoAnn Montemurro is unconvincing as the jaded public defender who puts her career on the line for the kid. But the relationship between Angel and his fellow inmate, serial killer Lucius (Bradford Stevens), bursts with pent-up rage, confusion, and dollops of genuine wit.”
Kris Vire, Time Out—“While he wrestles with weighty questions about shadings of morality and the limits of our legal system, Guirgis manages to temper his didacticism with doubt. His habit of placing ten-dollar words in the mouths of ten-cent mooks seems more ennobling than condescending. He’s assisted in Menendian’s production by the inviting central performances of Cruz and Stevens, who wring complex combinations of humor and pathos from impossible situations. There are no easy answers here, but the questions are well considered.”
Scott C. Morgan, Windy City—“Director Michael Menendian’s production isn’t perfect, but neither is Guirgis’ play. Though Jesus Hopped the A Train has street cred-worthy dialogue like in Guirgis’ Our Lady of 121st Street, its structure is too disjointed with non-incarcerated characters addressing the audience to explain themselves and to further the plot along. What is genuine is Cruz’s conflicted performance. From his simpering attempts to recite the Lord’s Prayer to his swaggering boasts of what he’ll do when he wins his freedom, Cruz’s gets to the heart of Angel with a spot-on authenticity that is both comic and tragic.”
Six Years, New Leaf Theatre
Kerry Reid, Reader—“It’s the anti-Mad Men. Sharr White’s mournful, episodic drama (scenes are set every six years between 1949 and 1973) nestles into a marriage and social milieu not far removed from those portrayed in the AMC series… Jessica Hutchinson’s staging for New Leaf Theatre has some clunky scene changes, but the riveting chemistry between Fawcett and Harman makes us believe that these two have endured the worst years of their lives together without completely losing their souls. Darci Nalepa’s party girl also deserves special mention.”
Zac Thompson, Time Out—“[Director Jessica] Hutchinson’s small-but-searing production is fittingly claustrophobic; with the audience seated in the round, we feel trapped in the family’s living room and party to their dissection. As Phil and Meredith, [Sean Patrick] Fawcett and [Marsha] Harman throb with tender resentment and quiet desperation.”