Playwright: George S. Kaufman and Howard Teichmann. At: Open Eye Productions at the. Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport. Phone: 773-935-6860; $20. Runs through: April 5. Photo by Paul Metreyeon.
Scholarly playgoers under 30 may want to consult a glossary before seeing this museum piece from 1953. After all, we are talking an era of dictaphones, typewriters (manual, not electric), mimeograph machines and answering services, when advertisements for industrial materials—or just about anything, for that matter—featured scantily-clad bimbos, when a CEO salary of $175K was an outrageous sum, and newscasters smoked cigarettes on-camera. What requires no re-orientation, however, is the notion of corporate conglomerates being run by self-serving crooks.
The squad of greedheads on the board of General Products (“If General Products doesn’t make it, there’s no money in it”) are enjoying the benefits extended them by the company founder’s absence after having been called to Washington. At their first stockholder’s meeting, however, a middle-aged matron owning a petty 10 shares begins to question their decisions. Their solution is to hire her, at a starting wage of—gasp!—$400 a week, to oversee “stockholder relations”—a mythical post designed to keep her occupied and out of the way. But gradually, this humble citizen’s enthusiasm, resourcefulness and down-home values land her not only a multi-millionaire boyfriend, but power beyond her most extravagant dreams.
This populist parable is presented by its authors as a modern-day fairy tale—a framing device fully justifying Open Eye Productions’ loony-tunes approach to its text. But if the popularity of television’s Mad Men, the latter set a decade after our play’s period, make for some anachronisms—the length of the women’s skirts, for one—Open Eye’s replication of a world at once distant and familiar is sufficiently accurate to locate us while avoiding the distractions of gratuitous nostalgia. (If your suspension of disbelief can handle a tycoon’s assertion that his experience in the federal government taught him to be honest, you’ll be fine.)
Maintaining the pace demanded of screwball comedy is no easy task; its challenge, in this case, is compounded by the reconfiguration of a three-act text to a cool one hour and 45 minutes (with intermission). Director Chris Maher has assembled a cast adept at keeping character and traction at high speeds—among them, Sara Sevigny (recently seen in the Hypocrites’ roller-coaster Threepenny Opera) playing the reluctant reformer, ably supported by Kevin Grubb as her enlightened capitalist swain, Neal Starbird as GP’s chief slimeball and a delightfully acerbic Dean Peerman as our waspish storybook-wielding narrator.