A woman holding a gun is an image guaranteed to snare our attention, and despite playwright Brooke Allen’s many self-conscious narrative conceits, the rural-noir thriller that follows this opening tableau emerges as likewise gripping, albeit not nearly as violent as its premise may lead us to expect. Anticipating this, our genial host (billed in the playbill as ‘The Narrator’) displays a.32-caliber automatic pistol like a trial lawyer introducing evidence, assuring us as he does that, no matter how much the dramatis personae may talk, it will be fired more than once in the course of our story.
Playwright: Brooke Allen
At: Not Waiting Productions at
Chemically Imbalanced Theatre, 1420 W. Irving Park
Phone: 800-838-3006; $20
Runs through: Aug. 10
That story begins with Ruby, herself, discovered in a bedroom, bound and gagged by the sinister stranger whom she picked up at a bar the night before. But just when we think this will be a simple victim-versus-villain melodrama, we learn that these two adversaries have met before, and that the captive may have been stalking the captor. Occasionally intruding on the action are personalities from Ruby’s memory—such as her devoted fiancé and her ballet-dancing sister—along with the aforementioned narrator, who refuses to relinquish his part in shaping the progress of the conflict, even after being shot by his insubordinate protagonist.
This procedural of murder and vengeance, recounted in starkly realistic idiom, could have been crafted into a suitably shivery hinterland gothic. But Allen skirts the task of configuring its literary aspects—flashbacks, soliloquies, omniscient observations—into a linear plot, instead relying on such familiar theatrical conventions as self-activating television monitors, cheerfully quirky apparitions popping out from under furniture and even a Dumb-Show prologue (yes, exactly like in Hamlet). While these measures may have expedited the writing, however, the cerebral distraction presented by the sudden leaps back and forth in time only impede our comprehension of the information necessary to spark our interest.
Even so, Ruby Wilder could just as easily been reduced to a mean-spirited ‘dark comedy’, replete with smug hee-haw slapstick, if Allen-as-director and the actors of Not Waiting Productions did not keep a firmly compassionate rein on their characters. Amid Allen-as-author’s mosaic manipulations, their tightly-focused gravity gradually earns our emotional investment in the outcome of a whodunit that expands into whats and whys, its moral ambiguity increasing as facts come to light. And isn’t that the way such seemingly cut-and-dried crimes always finish nowadays?