Playwright: Jim Grimsley
At: About Face Theatre, Theatre Building
Phone: (773) 327-5252; $25-$28
Runs through: June 1
Serial killer Randall Bartelman is good-looking, strong and silent which makes it easy for him to pick up young men, he tells us. Continually insecure about his looks, the fictional Randall (Mark Montgomery) nonetheless is aware of his attractiveness and proves it when he ensnares a pompous TV pundit (Scott Duff). Everyone comments on Randall’s eyes, yet Darin Keesing’s lighting intentionally keeps those eyes in near-perpetual shadow.
But shadowy is what Jim Grimsley wants in his new play. Randall is a reactive central figure who almost never initiates action, not even seduction, for Fascination is not so much about Randall as how others respond to him in this life and the next. Alas, here Grimsley relies upon colorfully sketched but thinly drawn types: the talkative neighbor (Patricia Kane); the religious cultist who obsesses over him (Amy Matheny); the guilt-stricken mother (Millicent Hurley-Spencer) of Randall’s first victim, an aggressive prettyboy (James McKay) who sets the pattern for the following murders. The really odd characters are Randall’s dead parents: his grossly overweight mother (Kane again) and his weak and sexless father (Ted Hoerl). But even commenting from the afterlife, the parents don’t offer an obvious path to Randall’s pathology, no cause-and-effect for his self-loathing and repressed gayness, or murderous bent.
Director Eric Rosen offers an evocative and visual—but not explicit—production. The stage is masked in opaque plastic sheeting that opens to reveal a square shadowbox framed by heavy wooden beams in a classic proscenium configuration. In Geoffrey M. Curley’s scenic design, two miniature shadowboxes—self-contained sets big enough for two seated people—slide on and off. The performers, too, provide strength: Lincolnesque Montgomery, archetypal cutie McKay, aggressive Duff, perky Kane, spirited Matheny, John Waters-like Hoerl and care-worn Hurley-Spencer.
Yet Randall remains elusive in this world premiere, in part because he’s inarticulate although certainly intelligent, in part because constriction is the principal impulse of the writing and staging: a tightly boxed set, deliberate and limited physical movement, an emotional universe that gives most actors a single mood to play, rather than a dynamic range. Even Randall largely is internalized. In his only revelatory monologue, he states the real Randall couldn’t express himself with such eloquence. ‘Smells are everything to me. Smells are sex to me. The scent of his blood and brain was so intoxicating,’ he says in explaining why he smashed open a victim’s head, watched him die and then sexed the corpse. Despite the vivid language, Fascination never uncorks itself quite enough to deliver a gut punch with the monologue, or late surprise information. The 85-minute work seems sculpted as a cylinder, rather than pyramiding to a point. It’s a ghostly show—sometimes literally—that’s effectively moody but not penetrating.