Two plays—one adequate, one not. So goes the staccato, stylized rhythm of Daniel MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone, the first and strongest of two entries in Theatre Seven’s largely forgettable Boys and Girls. Both one acts—Never Swim Alone is followed by Wendy MacLeod’s The Shallow End—deal with competition and cruelty. But while MacIvor’s 40-minute piece about vicious young corporate execs is both intriguing and disturbing, MacLeod’s tale of mean girls at a swimming pool honestly feels more like an extracurricular middle school project than a professional production.
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Playwrights: Daniel MacIvor, Wendy MacLeod. At: Theatre Seven at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph. Phone: 312-742-8497; $15. Runs through: June 15
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Things start well enough, with director Margot Bordelon helming MacIvor’s chilling, elliptical story of two sharks in suits. As Frank and Bill (Brian Golden and Brian Stojak, each personifying the sort of dangerous arrogance that can lead to rape and other acts of malevolent machismo) circle each other like predators, incisors are gleaming and every move is infused with a palpable sense of lurking, amoral danger: Get too close to these two, and you might get a limb snapped off. The pair is engaged in 13 rounds of a surreal competition, refereed by a whistle-blowing girl in a bathing suit (Rebecca Buller). Who is taller? Who has the biggest penis? Whose work is more valued? And most ominously, who won—and who lost—the long-ago teenage race to the point? That end-of-summer swim was an event of ultimate cruelty,its consequences a revelation of the soulless, pathologically ruthless will to succeed that consumes Frank and Bill. Compassion, they note, is the mother of guilt and guilt is the mother of stomach cancer. With bone-crunching work by fight choreographer Derek Peruo, Never Swim Alone is a disturbing gem.
The same cannot be said of the non-starter, often unintelligible The Shallow End. The title is a not-so-clever play on words, since the piece deals with shallow teens gathered poolside. The plot, such as it is, deals with three mean girls talking trash and playing mean tricks on the nerdy, eyeglass-wearing bookworm who—like OMG, what a doofus!—is uncool enough to sit in a beach chair.
Shallow feels like a cross between a Judy Blume parody and a rip-off of Jack Heifner’s far superior Vanities. Director McCarthy fails to elicit even a modicum of emotional truth from a very young (there are several eighth graders in the group) cast. Note to the director: If your cast isn’t even up to making the dialogue audible, you wind up with a production that’s dead in the water.