Playwright: Egan Reich

At: Steep Theatre, 1115 W. Berwyn

Phone: (312) 458-0722; $18

Runs through: Dec. 6

BY JONATHAN ABARBANEL

I’ve sat through four-hour plays that seemed to last just minutes, and one-hour plays that felt like forever. At two and a half hours, Seven Days was eternity in purgatory. It was a good idea for Steep Theatre to celebrate its new theater space (and a fine space it will be once the paint fumes clear, with 130 seats and a gracious lobby) with a big world-premiere play by a company member. But Seven Days is impenetrable, episodic and pretentiously metaphoric. Its selection is unfathomable to me, and I’m a really smart guy with a lot of new-play expertise. It’s not helpful that the play’s most indelible images are of women gratuitously imprisoned and beaten.

Seven Days is set, vaguely, on America’s frontier sometime after the Civil War and before the invention of the automobile. Folks travel by train and horse, and communicate by telegraph. But the play is intentionally anachronistic, with some characters dressed in perfectly modern clothes and others in 19th-century duds. There are references to meth addicts and flavored vodka. There are 20th-century phrases such as ‘I’m a dick’ and ‘the private sector.’ There are flights of poetic fancy shoved against contemporary crudities. The Old Testament tale of Jacob’s pursuit of Rachel by way of Leah is mirrored in the play’s title and in the two women who interact with the putative hero, Herzog, a Jewish mine owner. Trouble is, Herzog is totally passive and reactive. He doesn’t initiate a single action. The putative heroine, his intended bride, is a woman with two names and a blurry, never-explained past connection with one of the two chief villains.

There’s a corrupt senator, a vicious property developer, a journalist, a thief and 23 characters in all—played by 11 actors. Many characters come and go unnamed, and without exposition. How they connect to each other is a mystery. There are references to a foreign war, a political assassination, a failed economy. Metaphoric is one thing—playwright Egan Reich (assisted by the ensemble) has much to say about government, collusion and exploitation—but incomprehensible is another.

In a play as choppy and episodic as Seven Days, there’s little opportunity for good acting. The best players have a few good moments based on their own personal intensity, but they have no character through-lines to play out, no development. How can they when so many appear in just one scene or a few scenes and then disappear without explanation? Seven Days is a play of non sequiturs in words and actions.

Steep Theatre isn’t the first troupe to have growing pains in moving to a spanking new venue. Hey, it even happened to Steppenwolf. Seven Days is a growing pain, and a Big Pain at that.