Playwright: Arthur Miller. At: Eclipse Theatre Company at the Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln. Phone: 773-404-7336; $25. Runs through: May
Our play opens with a badly battered young woman whose injury patterns indicate a recent suicide by defenestration. She proceeds to recount how her anti-government insurgents were recently arrested, and how she was granted clemency because the commander in this military dictatorship (obviously modeled on Colombia, despite the principal actors being uniformly Anglo) is her uncle. Faced with her failure as a subversive agitator, she jumped from a fourth-floor window, but upon landing, found both her life and morale restored by an anonymous stranger whom the commoners, we soon learn, have declared to be the Son of God.
A premise like this can go in a number of directions, particularly when the next scene reveals the aforementioned commander’s intent to track down this messianic troublemaker and sentence him to execution by crucifixion—a firing squad being insufficiently spectacular for the Hollywood producer seeking to film the event and prepared to pay a sum that will rescue the third-world country’s economy. Our story could unfold as a theological symposium on the second coming (or myth thereof), a diatribe on cruel foreign statesmanship, a slapstick farce of strutting petty tyrants or a satire on commercial show biz.
When you’re 85 years old and one of the greatest playwrights in American Theater, you can do as you please, and what pleased Arthur Miller in 2002 was to go in all these directions simultaneously. This makes for a lengthy text replete with discussions of ethics, testimonials to the cult leader’s charisma, hippie-dippy gospel analogies (“We’ll be killing a criminal” snaps the general to which a quasi-disciple replies, “That’s what they said the first time”), stupid-materialistic-Yankee shtick and interpretive dances by lissome female natives—the whole megillah scumbled together as only a Jewish playwright delving New Testament mysteries can embrace them.
The author might have missed his chance to ascertain the best course for his manifesto, but the Eclipse Theatre Company appears to have likewise postponed deciding their production’s focus, instead adopting a curiously wooden tone perhaps meant to signify solemn reverence for every aspect of Miller’s thematic mishmosh. Nina O’Keefe and Rebecca Prescott achieve a measure of coherence in the roles of Mary Magdalene and Judith-analogs, while Ron Butts delivers a heartfelt portrait of a contemplative father seeking redemption, but the allegories cannot help but recall earlier experiments in pop evangelism during the age of Godspell and Woody Allen.