Playwright: Spike Kunetz
At: Crawford Hose Company at Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland Ave.
Phone: (773) 384-0494; $12-$15
Runs through: Oct. 29
Our setting is Lambert-St. Louis International Airport on a snowy night. A pair of corporate co-workers, the obnoxious Jake Kirby and the earnest Kevin Loften, squirm in their seats at the end of the runway. Joe and Joan, whose surnames we forget almost immediately, wait patiently for their son to arrive home from college. Billy Fields from Idaho, returning from a fishing trip, and Mattie, whose last name we never learn, hurrying to a modeling job in Chicago, rest uncomfortably on their respective baggage. As these dissimilar citizens languish in impatient boredom, we gradually get to know—and in some cases, even like—them better.
A fundamental problem with Cross-Section-of-Society dramas is that narrative symmetry demands that each of the individual stories be given relatively equal focus, regardless of whether their content supports such an outlay of onstage time. A David Mamet-styled scam requires large amounts of seemingly-innocuous chat to achieve the proper punch, and we would be disappointed if Boy got Girl TOO easily, even if their courtship is plainly of the screwball-slapstick variety (how many women—even a stereotypical Latina spitfire—would chase their swain into the Men’s Room?).
The dynamics of a patriarch alienated from his family, however, are so familiar that playwright Spike Kunetz has no recourse but to repeat them. To this purpose, his drab couple dither over nonessentials—the contents of Joan’s bottomless purse, for example—in a treadwater tactic that stretches the show’s running time nearly thirty minutes over that announced at curtain by a flight attendant who also swiftly degenerates into caricature after joining the dramatis personae.
Most of the cast assembled by director Jason Kae possess the necessary stamina to sustain artificial and overwritten personalities swapping the kind of repartee found only in situation comedies. (‘Are you talking to me or chewing a brick? Either way, you lose your teeth!’ snaps Mattie, to which Billy mildly replies, ‘You’re sore as a woodpecker in a petrified forest.’) But if Kunetz’s intent is to strand US in the airport with them, we still have the option of rescheduling our flight and going home.