Playwright: Thomas Babe. At: Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company at Angel Island, 735 W. Sheridan Rd.. Phone: 773-871-0442; $18-$22. Runs through: Dec. 22
Is there a playgoer in America who doesn’t recognize the squad room of a New York City police station by now? Or who can’t spot a playwright taking advantage of the interrogation process customary thereto as a means of keeping characters confined until their conflicts are exhausted? From Sidney Kingsley’s 1949 Detective Story to the latest episode of Law & Order, the dirty business of fighting crime has facilitated lurid melodrama for spectators seeking a safely-detached walk on the underside.
Thomas Babe’s promenade efficiently locates us in a Manhattan cop shop on the fourth of July 1977 where the two-man night shift grumbles about working on a holiday. Not that either is in any hurry to leave: Jack Delasante, we learn, is estranged from his family, and Frank Kelly grasps at every excuse to avoid going to the aid of his suicidal daughter. Fortuitously, they have a pair of murder suspects in custody–pretty-boy druggie Jimmy Rosehips and urbane chicken-hawk Simon Cohen, who prefers to be called Sean. Before these four ill-met conspirators collaborate on a confession based more in convenience than fact, they will invoke altered states of consciousness–Kelly with whiskey, and his three comrades with opiates–leading them to reveal themselves in bursts of lyrical introspection.
This scenario stretches the credulity of audiences savvy in police procedurals (as who isn’t, in 2007), and long-time patrons of the Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company have lost count of the occasions requiring onstage personnel to haul out the hooch and hypodermics. But who cares? For all its testosteronic pretense, A Prayer For My Daughter is what’s known as an “Actors’ Play”, its narrative logic wholly subordinate to the opportunities it offers for performers to display their skills at illumination of interpersonal dynamics.
Seen from this perspective, actor-turned-director Si Osborne has assembled a dream-team of players adept at portraying gritty lowlifes, led by Karl Potthoff as the volatile Kelly, whose bluster is perfectly balanced by Ron Wells’ quietly seductive Simon/Sean. And though the nooyawk accents are spotty at best, Paul Joseph’s Kentucky twang lends an exotic dimension to the befuddled Delasante, while Garrett Matheson’s naive Jimmy keeps the visual and vocal harmonies in continuous focus to make for riveting action–even if, ultimately, we don’t give any more of a damn than her father whether Kelly’s child offs herself.