Playwright: David Scott Hay
At: Voices And Visions Theatre Company at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago
Phone: (773) 506-4542; $20
Runs through: May 30
Dan and Gwen and John and Penny are mired down in mid-life crisis. Or perhaps it’s delayed Adolescent Angst, since the text of David Scott Hay’s play indicates that they are all barely 30 years old. Whatever the source of their unease, it attests to the continuing popularity of attractive-affluent-adults-behaving-like-teenagers as cultural icons.
What precipitates this premature Big Chill is novelist Dan’s first major book contract, success he intends to celebrate by proposing to his beloved Evelyn. This prospect is viewed with dismay by his brother-in-law and best buddy, John, who postponed his own writing career to complete law school. Dan’s ex-girlfriend Gwen, now a popular author of B & D Erotica, is likewise skeptical of his marital plans, or maybe just unwilling to let go of the past. What both agree on is that Evelyn (whom we never see) is clearly Miss Wrong—she doesn’t even READ, an unforgivable sin in lit-biz circles. Of course, neither does John’s wife, Penny, which is probably why THEIR marriage is in trouble.
Three of the four participants in this severely circumscribed gene pool being writers, their idiom is the glib repartee we attribute to practitioners of that trade, replete with casually tossed-off witticisms (‘my decaffeinated Muse’) and newscaster rhetoric (‘Now there’s a sad commentary.’), their most intimate conversations sprinkled with euphemisms and extended metaphors. More annoying, however, are the frequent interruptions, during which Hay’s personnel articulate their innermost thoughts—an unnecessary affectation (like the punctuation of the play’s title), since the secrets revealed therein are easily discernible in the surface dialogue, both by the other characters and by us.
‘It’s going to end badly, isn’t it?’ says Dan at the start of Act Two. Director Jessi D. Hill makes no judgments, nor do the actors struggling with Hay’s self-conscious preciosity (with only Jennifer Pompa’s Penny hinting at a life outside the abrasively shallow universe dictated by the script). But when the author’s notes in the playbill begin, ‘Six years ago I slit my wrists and bled into a notebook,’ an unhappy conclusion would seem likely, yes.