Playwright: Robert Patrick
At: The People’s Theater of Chicago for 2007 Rhinoceros Theatre Festival at Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston
Phone: 773-267-6660; $15 or open donation
Runs through: Sept. 24
Confession time: I was a few minutes late getting into The People’s Theater of Chicago’s production of Robert Patrick’s Hollywood at Sunset. Call it poor planning on my part, though I can legitimately blame being caught up in post-Cubs game traffic.
So, wandering into the darkened theater and ducking into an empty seat, I was bewildered to see two very attractive men reading from scripts. Was there a last-minute cast replacement? Did the actors not learn their lines in time? Is reading from the script in the script?
My guess is that director Madrid St. Angelo has applied a ‘concept’ to Robert Patrick’s play of a gay couple bumping up against the glass closet in early 1990s Hollywood. The first scene has the actors reading from scripts, perhaps to symbolize the couple’s conflicted and developing relationship (as in the rehearsal process). The second scene is a filmed telephone conversation of the couple, probably to show them separated by work. The final happy-ending scene is done live without scripts or film clips.
Why? I can’t reasonably say why St. Angelo felt it necessary to apply these distancing stage tricks. Being tethered to scripts clearly hampers the performances of Christopher Slavik and Andrew Kain Miller. They’re both very pretty to watch, but they’re never fully believable their respective roles as a quip-addicted old-Hollywood-film fanatic television writer named Penn and a proto-Queer Nation media critic/director named Aaron toiling away his talents on karaoke videos.
Besides, Patrick’s play is more like a series of essays and issues about accommodation made by gays working in Hollywood than an actual character drama. If you really want a queer theory evisceration of the heterosexism in the 1990s films Philadelphia and Interview With the Vampire, it might be wiser to visit the Gerber/Hart Library and dig out old issues of The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review instead of seeing two actors argue the merits of each film on stage.
Along with the so-so acting and the mediocre drama, the execution of the telephone conversation film clip is also subpar. Are we to believe that Aaron is in California when a Lincoln Towing sign bearing a Chicago 773-telephone number looms in the background of several shots?
But who am I to criticize and judge? I was five minutes late, so take my observations of what I saw with a grain of salt. Those first five minutes could have set the establishing tone and concept that eluded my unflattering take on Hollywood at Sunset.