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)

Brett Neveu doesn’t do issue plays, though you might say he’s intrigued by issues: disaffected teenagers and their violent urges (“Eric LaRue”); the emotional fallout of 9/11 (“Empty”); drug addiction and single parenthood (“the go”); sibling rivalry run amok (“The Earl,” currently in an open-ended run at A Red Orchid). What’s most interesting about Neveu’s work, though, are the conversations—the everyday speak that is neither theatrical nor pithy, but somehow very, very intriguing all the same. And so, “Heritage” (receiving its debut at the American Theater Company), which has all the fixings of an issue play, Neveu-style. In present-day Louisiana, a trio of prisoners—two white, one black—spend their days sweating and rehabbing an old plantation house, while their corrections officers—one white, one black—oversee their efforts. But even a good premise—and this one is a doozy—needs to evolve past the obvious dilemmas. Neveu negates his strongest attribute as a writer in the character of Randy Myer, the sole black prisoner who is mute throughout much of the play. For a guy who writes conversation like nobody’s business, it’s odd that we rarely hear from the one character whose rage and outrage are both on-the-mark and entirely misplaced. Director Edward Sobel and his cast find moments of resonance, but ultimately this production is neither here nor there, but lost in a limbo of ideas and potential. (Nina Metz)

This production is now closed.

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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 »

It is one thing when a play’s characters are ambiguous. It is quite another when the play itself is cryptic and impenetrable. Brett Neveu, an oft-produced local playwright who is gaining wider attention nationally and abroad, has never been one to spell things out nice and neat. His plays—cunning observations about normal people in very normal, if stressful, situations—are often just opaque enough to let your imagination wander in and poke around for a bit. In his latest work, “4 Murders,” in an awkward debut at A Red Orchid Theatre, that effect is thwarted by the play’s staunch refusal to explain itself. Through a series of four vaguely interconnected one-acts, we follow an unnervingly quiet serial killer (Lawrence MacGowan, who puts his soft, rumbly voice to good use here) as he meets with, and then calmly murders, four randomly chosen victims. There are no whys or what-fors—an omission that distracts from the quirky, potentially engrossing, free-associative conversations that precede each murder. Ultimately the play feels like the theatrical equivalent of a Rorschach test. It’s nearly impossible to make sense of the thing—no matter how you look at it, it’s all one big splotch. There is, however, a banal kind of poetry to these characters and director Guy Van Swearingen’s cast is entirely watchable, if somewhat tic-laden, in their performances. But the clunky set, lighting and sound design do these actors no favors. (Nina Metz)

This production is now closed.

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We’ve always known we were a town for theater. But this year perhaps we needed outsiders to remind us of just how great Chicago’s theater community is compared not only with New York, but with the rest of the world. Venerable London theater critic Michael Billington went so far as to herald our city as the “current theatre capital of America” after a recent visit, citing not only the three big S’s (Chicago Shakespeare, Second City and Steppenwolf), but also Victory Gardens and the Goodman. Other critics from New York and Toronto sent similar, although not quite as superlative, love letters this year. So it seems fitting this year that  our Players issue, in the past reserved for members of the theater community who wield the most power, focus on the artists—those both on stage and behind-the-scenes who make out-of-towners go home and drool. Read the rest of this entry »