It’s one thing to be pissed, but the grotesque vaudeville that is John Clancy’s finger-wagging, America-bashing comedy (in a production at A Red Orchid Theatre) is the intellectual equivalent of slinging animal dung across the stage.  Everyone’s entitled to a tantrum now and then—even playwrights; or perhaps especially playwrights—and I certainly dig Clancy’s remarkably profane verbosity; the script reads like a longshoreman’s guide to insults.  And it’s not that I disagree with the play’s larger point.  But man, does Clancy take his time getting there—and when he finally does, he hammers that sucker like a man paid by the swing.  Guy Van Swearingen’s more-is-more direction doesn’t seem to be doing the play any favors, but it is certainly audacious.  Fatboy, in the world of Clancy’s agitprop, is a stand-in for America—a bloated, murdering pig who takes what he wants and wants what he takes.  He is “South Park”’s Cartman all grown up; a bloated, misanthropic, foul-mouthed Dickinson villain on steroids.  It’s a compelling characterization, but as politically minded theater the play is shooting blanks.  The metaphor and all its encompassing ideas are shoved down your throat in a fit of playwright outrage.  Clancy doesn’t want you to think; he wants you to agree or get the fuck out.  That being said, I kind of like what Steve Pickering has done with Fatboy—it’s as if he’s a bully trapped in one of those plastic sumo-wrestler thingies.  Jennifer Engstrom, as his nympho wife, Queen Fudgie, is a marvelous-ugly cartoon brought to life—equal parts Carol Channing and Carol Burnett’s charwoman, with a dash of that supreme prehensile tackiness represented in all its glory on “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”  If that ain’t American, I don’t know what is.  (Nina Metz)

At A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N Wells, (312)943-8722. This production is now closed.

By Nina Metz

If you live in Lakeview and have ever dumped unwanted furniture curbside, there is a chance that end table or chair or whatever ended up in the back of Grant Sabin’s truck. And quite possibly, on a theater stage near you.

The 24-year-old set designer works predominantly within the storefront-theater scene, where the venues are small, and the scenic-design budgets even smaller—usually in the $500-$1,000 range. Sometimes less. To put it in context, the larger companies in town spend up to five and six-figures on their sets. So yes, Sabin—who hails from Rochelle, Illinois, a farm community west of Chicago—frequently stocks his sets with found objects, out of necessity, but also something else. “I think having limitations kind of forces creativity,” he says.

This month he has designed the sets for three shows, including “Butt Nekkid” at The Side Project and “A Prayer for My Daughter” at Mary-Arrchie (both of which begin performances Sunday). The third, Blindfaith Theatre’s “Lord Butterscotch and the Curse of the Darkwater Phantom,” opens at the Storefront Theater November 30.

Not surprisingly, Sabin has gone scavenging. The set for “Butt Nekkid,” about the music industry in Los Angeles, features recycled pieces of furniture and “a great pedestal sink found in the construction dumpster across from my apartment,” he says. “It looks new.”

The Mary-Arrchie show, which depicts a police interrogation in a squad room, has a set dressed with items used in “The Pillowman” (seen at the Steppenwolf last August), specifically some filing cabinets that already had the perfect labels: “warrants,” “fingerprint forms,” “criminal history.”

“I also needed a radiator for this show,” he says, “and having moved real radiators up to the second floor at Mary-Arrchie in the past, I thought I would have to cut it in my design. But when I was working over at Columbia College on ‘Pack of Lies’ [a recent student production], there in the lobby, under the drinking fountain, was a fake radiator. Apparently it was left from the previous show and wasn’t tossed out by the janitors, because it looked like it was heating the building. It’s great—lightweight, and now in the Mary-Arrchie show.”

On any given day, Sabin says, he will get in his truck and simply drive the neighborhood. “That’s the best way to find things. There’s tons of great stuff that gets tossed all the time in the city, just because it’s too hard to move, or whatever. There was an article I read about the freegans, which I guess is a new group of people that are trying to live more green—furnish their apartments with stuff that gets thrown out, things like that—and I was like, ‘Wow, those are my kind of people.’”

He’s even gone back to his hometown to dumpster-dive. His classroom set design for Dog & Pony’s “Ape” (staged earlier this fall) was filled with the kind of chairs you only find in schools. “I actually went back to Rochelle for those. My dad’s a school principal out there, and in the basement of the school they had mismatched old chairs just kind of thrown by the boiler, so I grabbed some of those.”

Rochelle was also where he found the wood used to create the worn-and-scuffed barroom floorboards for “The Sea Horse,” at A Red Orchid in 2005. “One of my farming friends was taking down a barn, and I saw that pile of wood and thought, ‘Wow, that’d be perfect for that floor!’”

Since Sabin began working professionally two years ago, the Columbia College alumnus has been one of the most in-demand scenic designers in Chicago, and for good reason. He is frequently employed by the aforementioned companies—he is designing for “Fatboy” at A Red Orchid in January—and works on about twelve-to-fourteen shows a year. I can’t think of another local designer who is used as often as Sabin.

This spring he is an assistant designer on Lookingglass Theatre’s “Around the World in 80 Days,” and his work can also be seen at the Royal George, where he designed the set for “Forbidden Broadway,” currently in an open run.

Tiny stages and miniscule budgets are everyday hurdles for fringe theater companies, and from a design standpoint they can be debilitating. Too many young companies give short-shrift to design and the results can look cheap and uninspired—even depressing, when a crappy set becomes an obstacle the actors must overcome. (Money isn’t always the issue. Often the lush scenic designs at Chicago’s bigger Equity houses can be a distraction—so elaborate and literal, they start to resemble Barbie’s Playhouse.) But the set is the first thing an audience sees—even before we see the actors—and whenever I sit down and think, “That is an amazing set,” invariably Sabin’s name is in the program. What makes his work stand apart is that you are never conscious of the obvious money constraints. His designs are detailed and self-confident, and nothing reassures an audience more than an impressively executed set.

Not that Sabin would turn down a shout-out every now and then for his design-on-a-dime accomplishments. “Sometimes I wish that could almost be printed somewhere, like at the end of my bio: This set cost ten bucks.”

RECOMMENDED

Brett Neveu’s newest play (in a world premiere at A Red Orchid) gently suggests you choose your own interpretation of the contents therein. It’s not entirely clear what the play is about; Neveu isn’t offering pat answers, at any rate. Don’t take that as a drawback, but don’t walk in expecting a tidy narrative, either. Over the span of ninety minutes, the scenes cut back and forth between a training center that preps American travelers for the possibility of kidnapping overseas, and a coffee shop where the would-be victims—three women, professional types—meet during training breaks. In a broad sense, the play deals with the underlying feeling of a world gone crazy since 9/11, but Neveu is more specific in his focus. All politics are local, and I suppose all problems are local, too. Unless there is a terrorist directly in your face, it’s more likely that your own personal guilt, fury and life dissatisfaction will churn your stomach in knots. Is there such a thing as a tragedy of manners? Consider the things we do to one another in the name of polite conversation. The judgments that get passed off as friendly advice; the probing questions that imply there’s something wrong with you if you don’t want to share. The coffee klatch as a game of human Pac-Man—your fellow Americans as giant orbs with jaws that never stop flapping. At least, that’s what I got out of the show, directed by Edward Sobel with precise attention to Neveu’s banal rhythms of speech. The three women are terrific: Kirsten Fitzgerald, who is perfectly too loud and too much in her orange sherbet sweater poncho; Jennifer Engstrom, a brittle, high-strung yuppie in stiletto pumps; and Mierka Girten, whose buttoned-up, quiet personality masks a suppressed, thundering of rage. Everything is a digression, but there are two mini-anecdotes tucked in the script—one about a rape and murder at a nursing home, the other about a rabid dog attack—and couched within the play’s larger ambiguity, these monologues emerge as bright beacons of storytelling. (Nina Metz)

At A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 North Wells, (312)943-8722.  This production is now closed.

By Nina Metz

This is a ripe time for Chicago playwrights according to Brett Neveu, whose latest work, “Weapons of Mass Impact,” opens Monday at A Red Orchid Theatre. 

Over the past six years or so, no other local playwright has had as much new work produced as Neveu. You’d think the guy has it made. “The problem with that is ‘playwright’ and ‘have it made’—those two things never go together,” he says as we talk by phone.

He made this observation, by the way, from his new home in Los Angeles, where he and wife Kristen moved in August with their daughter, Lia Pearl, who turned 1 last week. “Mostly it was because we had the baby and we needed to have some more stability money-wise—or at least try to get that stability.” Kristen, who is a mixed-media artist, was the first to land a job. She works at Warner Bros. in the art department. And like so many before him, Neveu is hoping to write for television and film.

If he lands a lucrative writing gig—which seems likely, judging by his success to date—he will join the ranks of other nationally known playwrights who subsidize their theater dreams with Hollywood dollars, including Craig Wright (“Six Feet Under”), Theresa Rebeck (“Law & Order: Criminal Intent”) and Chicago’s own Rick Cleveland (who was just hired to write for AMC’s “Mad Men”).

It is a smart move for Neveu, 37, who was supporting his family primarily on teaching jobs (most recently at Northwestern) and playwriting commissions, which pay anywhere from $5,000-$10,000, depending on the theater. Neveu has had no shortage of commissions—companies such as the Goodman, Steppenwolf, Northlight and Writers’ have paid him to write plays. Currently he has commissions from the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York and Royal Court Theatre in London.

I’ve been commissioned many, many times,” he says, but “I’ve only had one theater produce the play they commissioned.” That would be “Old Town,” a musical about backroom political dealings set on election night in Cook County, which debuts in April at Strawdog. “They put it in the season before it was even finished,” a rare show of confidence from a theater.

But Neveu’s artistic home in Chicago is still A Red Orchid, where the claustrophobic dimensions of the stage seem perfectly suited to “Weapons of Mass Impact,” about a trio of kidnapped women who endure interrogation at the hands of their foreign captors—and at the hands of one another. 

The play is part of a trilogy that began with “Harmless,” seen last year at Timeline. (Part three is called “Old Glory” which Neveu is working on for Writers’ Theatre.) The plays each take place in the middle of the current decade, and they focus on how regular folks “mentally deal with the situations that crop up as a result of a country at war in the modern age.”

Despite the heavy subject matter, Neveu’s plays contain a sly sense of humor. He’s not writing jokes. The way Neveu sees it, people are just funny when they talk. “Especially in tense situations.” He doesn’t craft the perfectly articulated argument that would never transpire in real life. He writes dialogue that is riddled with awkward social niceties and subconscious hostility. He writes the way people genuinely talk, which is hilarious if you really listen to it.

The move to L.A. notwithstanding, Neveu is focused on theater. A possible strike by the Writers Guild of America “makes it harder for me [to get a job right now], so I’ll just wait until resolution happens. Whatcha gonna do?” He has a pair of commissions to work on, at any rate.

And more to the point, “My end goal was never to be a screenwriter or a TV writer. My end goal was to be a playwright, and that’s always been the case. Actually, my end goal is to be a writer, whatever it’s for. Actually, my end goal is just to have a job that I like.”

And regardless of what the future may bring, “I will always consider myself a Chicago playwright.”

“Weapons of Mass Impact” opens October 22 at A Red Orchid Theater, 1513 North Wells, (312)943-8722.

Sometimes a metaphor can become so muddled it is not even worth examining. In Brett Neveu’s newest play, the act of writing fiction is exposed for the sausage-making that it is. Intentionally clichéd characters barge through the front door of a writer’s cramped nest of an apartment and refuse to leave. On the phone, a persistent caller insists the writer has just won a modest grant—a windfall that is more insidious than a promise of free cash. The play could easily be called “The Writer’s Nightmare,” but in truth it is something closer to an audience nightmare. Self-induced claustrophobia has never been this excruciating, and the repetitive dialogue only reinforces the airless quality. (Buried in the script, almost as an afterthought, is Neveu’s precision of language and impish sense of humor.) Directed in a frenzy by Brennan Parks, the production feels wobbly and unsure; to compensate, the actors amp up the volume. It is not for a lack of skill—the ensemble is made up of proven talents—but here they give very loud, very large performances that are completely out of scale with A Red Orchid’s tight confines. It is like watching someone try to stuff a pit bull inside a matchbox. (Nina Metz)

This production is now closed.

In Brett Neveu’s “The Earl,” the black comedy about a trio of brothers who engage in a crazed, ritualized game of violence (currently in an open late-night run at A Red Orchid Theatre), Danny Goldring arrives on stage two-thirds of the way through the show and proceeds to steal the thing right out from under his fellow actors. It’s not his fault. Who can compete with a rangy figure like Goldring—a quasi-Clint Eastwood, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas rolled into one?

He portrays The Earl, an aging action-movie star who settles the bloody goings-on among the feuding brothers once and for all. He growls his lines and offers a steely stare. He is a gentleman with a bullshit detector a mile long. It is at once an homage to, and mocking of, the old-school tough guy cliché. “Wait, I have to put my sunglasses on for this,” Goldring said recently over coffee. “When I’m describing this to people to get them to come, I say, ‘He’s an aging action-movie star who never loses at anything. Whips off his sunglasses Ever.’” Goldring has apparently never met a hammy moment he could pass up. And really, why should he?

This is, after all, a man who has built his career playing small roles on TV shows like the various “Star Trek” series—“I’ve played a Herodian, which was a Nazi reptile, if that’s not redundant”—and generally spends his time in Los Angeles, ham-central, looking for work. In fact, the Woodstock, Illinois native hadn’t been on stage in thirteen years “because I had been chasing the mortgage out in L.A.” 

You don’t see many actors Goldring’s age doing rough-and-ready storefront theater these days in Chicago. Maybe that’s why his performance is such a hoot. “I’m gonna be here until at least the fall, and then I’ve got to go back out to L.A. and put my face back in the game,” he said. “Oh yeah, I’m blowing off pilot season, but I’m doing this from my heart.” Thump, thump goes the fist on his chest. 

“Red Orchid is in-your-face, down-and-dirty, let’s-get-it-done, here’s-the-play-folks, we-have-no-budget, but-we-have-a-lot-of-heart,” he said. “These people are fucking talented. They are. I’m proud to be a part of these guys, whatever that part is.”

So far, “The Earl” seems destined for life after its Red Orchid run. A trip to Edinburgh next year is a possibility. A film version is also apparently “in the works,” according to Neveu, who says “it looks like it might come together as a low-budget sorta thing. We’ll see.”

Goldring, who should know better after so many years in Hollywood, is more optimistic. “It’s going to be really dark on film, and I think it’s going to be a cross between ‘Blue Velvet’ and a ‘Three Stooges’ movie.” 

He cracked a smile, and then his cell phone rang. “I think that’s The Earl calling,” he joked. “Actually, it might be The Duchess. ‘Hello, whoever you are, I have to call you back.’” (Nina Metz)

This lesser-known work from Eugene Ionesco, presented by A Red Orchid, shows the master of absurdist theater working in a more fabulistic mode; many of the play’s abstract sequences could have been lifted from an unproduced Bergman film. Ionesco’s hero Jean (Lance Stuart Baker) leaves his wife (Kathie Logelin) and child along with his decrepit, dangerously slanty apartment in search of a vague dream. Along the way, he banters with museum guards about a mysterious woman before arriving at a sinister monastery. Ionesco deftly and abruptly shifts the tone of the play from lighthearted to chilling as the fanatic Brother Tarabas (Si Osborne) directs a play within the play on the utter malleability of the human spirit. This final act, in which the promise of soup is used to shatter the convictions of two starving prisoners, contains the play’s real raw energy. Earlier episodes threaten to drift into a poetic ethereality. This tendency is accentuated by the performances, particular Baker’s. Baker has demonstrated that he’s one of the city’s smartest and most versatile actors, as anyone who saw him in last year’s pairing of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Travesties” at the Court will recall. But his Jean is mostly a collection of tics, not just uncomfortable within his skin, but continuously threatening to burst out of it. (John Beer)

This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Sometimes the right actor is cast in just the right role. Wait until you get a load of Danny Goldring in Brett Neveu’s latest offering, which is currently in a loud-and-proud late-night run at A Red Orchid Theatre. As directed by Lance Baker, this good-time, throwaway horror-comedy vacillates between two extremes: It’s trash! It’s fantastic! Barely an hour long, it centers on trio of brothers who partake in a sadistic game that involves beating the crap out of each other with a tire iron. The rules follow a twisted interior logic—“I’m at G, you better get up” a brother warns his bloody pulp of a sibling, who lies crumpled on the floor—and I’m not sure I understood half of them. Who cares? It’s gruesome and funny. The game begins when one of the brothers returns home for a visit, and he has brought with him an unexpected addition, an extra player known as The Earl. Part “Fight Club,” part “True West,” part brawling for dummies, the show is violent and ridiculous, and it is insanely well cast; Steve Schine, Noah Simon and John Moran play the brothers with just the right amount of malice and petulance. But what makes this production work—and what makes it so incredibly entertaining—is Goldring’s straight-faced performance as The Earl, an old school Hollywood tough guy with a voice like whiskey and gravel, and a hokey suede jacket that he carefully folds and sets aside until the fighting’s done. Read the rest of this entry »

Splitting the difference between raw honesty and cliché, Edward J. Moore’s black-and-blue romance from the mid-seventies conjures a sputtering love affair in a down-at-the-heels dockside bar in a California fishing town. Harry and Gertie, the couple in question, are a pair of wounded dogs, snapping their jaws at anyone who comes too close. Other playwrights have traveled these thematic waters to greater success, but Moore gets his licks in with just enough force that, if cast right—as is the case with A Red Orchid’s production, directed by Dado—the play is hard to dismiss out of hand. Kirsten Fitzgerald’s Gertie is a linebacker, taking down everyone in her path. But she is more than brute force; this is an actress with a face that is at once beautiful and haggard. “I know what I am,” she says dismissively. Does she? Her worldview of the opposite sex isn’t all that brighter: “You’re all bastards.” Guy Van Swearingen doesn’t quite capture Harry’s loutish appeal, but this is a good performance regardless, full of desperation and complexity under the surface. Both actors do their share of boldface line readings, which don’t quite fit in AROT’s tiny space, but this is a minor quibble. Performances aside, Grant Sabin’s perfectly realistic set design—a dark, dank watering hole with floors warped by countless spilled beers—is the best thing the production has going for it. Sabin has done some very impressive work lately—he designed both the rural farmhouse for Mary-Arrchie’s “Buried Child” and the disintegrating apartment interior for Dog & Pony’s “Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake).” Like another designer in town, Brian Sydney Bembridge, Sabin works wonders with an ultra-small budget. (Nina Metz)

This production is now closed.

Like mismatched watch parts, nothing synchs up in A Red Orchid Theatre’s lumbering production of “Kimberly Akimbo,” a would-be comedy about a teenage girl who suffers a disease that causes her to age four-and-half times faster than normal—a one-joke premise that pretends to offer up insight, but leaves one feeling gypped instead. Kimberly has just turned sixteen; her hunched posture and wrinkly visage, however, scream “senior citizen.” (Mom and dad blank on her birthday, a detail playwright David Lindsay-Abaire blatantly steals, to zero effect, from “Sixteen Candles.”) Her disease sets her apart from the kids at school, but she finally makes a friend in Jeff, a nerd’s nerd with an anagram obsession nicely played by Steve Haggard, a nuanced actor who makes the most of a bad situation. Meanwhile, Kimberly’s parents are stuck in a marital limbo defined by sarcasm and trashy clothes. Then Aunt Debra arrives—she of the strung-out nerves and ex-con ways—creating yet more drama. The script is chockablock with plot, so much so that an actual story never emerges. Director Shade Murray is adrift within the playwright’s universe, an ill-conceived construct that force-feeds the audience high doses of wacky in place of anything real. Simply, the show never achieves rhythm. Roslyn Alexander’s vague and foggy performance as Kimberly is particularly troublesome. She is entirely miscast and clearly struggles with the role. (Nina Metz)

This production is now closed.