As we enter the theater, our attention is commanded by a young woman posed in the manner of Andrew Wyeth’s painting entitled Christina’s World. Since the other characters loitering on the fringes of the stage locate us in a sunbaked rural community, where only the gas station/auto repair shop and 16-ounce Budweisers indicate that we are in a more recent era than the Great Depression, her attitude of yearning is quite justified, as is the discovery that she is engaged in an adulterous affair with a white-collar townsman. But even if we don’t know that Melanie Marnich’s play is based on Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s tragedy, The Changeling, we are aware from the start that all will not end well for the illicit lovers.
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Playwright: Melanie Marnich. At: 5th Floor Productions at Edgewater. Presbyterian Church, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr. Phone: 312-731-0809; $10-$15. Runs through: June 3. Tallgrass Gothic. Photo by Clarissa Jessop.
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As the popularity of TV soaps attest, what was sensational in 1622 can be every bit as seductively shivery in 2008, but when a play’s action encompasses such Jacobean horrors as severed fingers and bloody ghosts (exotic sexual practices having diminished in their shock value over time), and even a promise to keep a secret comes with a ‘not if they hold a gun to my head’ clause, atmosphere is everything. One unprovoked giggle—while the wayward wife’s girlfriend calmly swallows a full-sized sword like a carnival trouper, say—could catapult the ambience out of the claustrophobic gloom necessary to this genre into shopworn juvenile camp.
Fortunately, this Chicago premiere by 5th Floor productions never permits that to happen. Under the direction of Jimmy McDermott, the dramatic progress displays the formality of classical pre-Renaissance art, while also invoking the suppressed emotions reflective of the 19th-century literary movement also designated ‘gothic’, its measured pace generating a tension so palpable that the snap of a pop-top, or the crunch of a discarded beer can crushed beneath a merciless foot, conveys all the menace of an ammunition round chambered in a rifle. The mostly young actors likewise never succumb to twitchy self-consciousness, but retain a concentrated focus their every onstage moment.
The superlative ensemble work showcased in this debut production would, in itself, render Tallgrass Gothic a successful rural-noir adaptation of its source material, but playgoers seeking modern dimensions in its Old World milieu can see in the performance of Andrew Jessop as the enigmatically intense Feline, the shadow of every school-shooter pledged to be a hero to the haughty lady who spurns his desire.