Playwright: Peter Papadopoulos. At: Hypatia Theatre Company at Stage Left, 3408 N. Sheffield. Phone: 312-714-0571; $20. Runs through: Dec. 22
There’s a simple explanation for why Mitzy, the distraught bride, and Tito, the unruffled parking attendant, do not flee each other’s company: They are stranded atop a floating table, awaiting rescue from the terrible storm and subsequent flood that swamped the wedding. More curious is why lesbian couple Barb and Jan stay together, especially after the latter goes batty watching television news coverage of the disaster, combined with a documentary on the Discovery Channel, accompanied by narration in near-unintelligible French accents, dealing with social evolution.
The voiceover in that anthropological dissertation could very easily be that of playwright Peter Papadopoulos, whose affinity for the dramatic conventions of European Academe extends to dialogue composed in an idiom artificial enough to have been translated into English from another language. But back to the story: Jan first sells everything in the house she shares with Barb—except the bed and the TV, of course—and then volunteers to take in a pair of disaster refugees (guess who?), whose arrival conveniently forestalls the lovers’ parting of the ways in the wake of an infidelity. We learn all this through several protracted internal monologues, interspersed with bouts of shrill tantrums and sitcom-shtick (deciding what goes on the pizza—not even apocalypse stops Domino’s—or who sleeps next to whom in the single crowded bed.)
Hypatia Theatre Company founders Caitlin Montanye Parrish and Erica L. Weiss recount in a playbill note how they ‘cried from laughing so hard’ while reading what Papadopoulos has described as his ‘edgy romantic comedy tragedy.’ Absorbing the various themes and subtexts purported to be encapsulated in this quasi-absurdist symposium—did I mention vegetarianism, American materialistic values and global warming?—at the leisurely pace afforded by a script might reveal insights hidden among the two hours of contradictory clutter comprising its performance. But if, as the playbill note further proclaims, Hypatia’s goal is the promotion of ‘complex and dynamic roles for women, realism be damned,’ the bigger question confronting audiences is how a play featuring irrational females babbling, shrieking and otherwise indulging in petty, infantile behavior (while the men remain consistently cool and collected) fits into that mission.