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The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow,
an instant message with excitable music
By Rolin Jones
Directed by Cecilie Keenan
Produced by Collaboraction
At Chicago Dramatist
1105 W. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL
Call312-226-9633, tickets $18 - $25
Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 pm
Sundays at 2pm
Running time is 2 hours, 10 minutes with intermission
Through April 1, 2007
Irritating, noisy work short on laughs
Amazingly, Rolin Jones’ The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow was a 2006 Pultizer Finalist and an OBIE award winner. This work uses every conceivable high tech gimmick, gadget including techo-music to tell its convoluted story. The comedy/parody is short on laughs (half the opening night audience laughed and half sat stone faced—me included). This show has many problems from the loud, often irritating tech-electric guitar music forcing the Jenny Shin (Jennifer Marcus) character to shout to be heard to the unlikable main character to the plastic cliché-ridden parents to the stupid implausible story line, this overly ambitious work falls under its own wait.
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The story revolves around a nasty genius, obsessive-compulsive agoraphobic girl into technology and addicted to her computer and chatrooms and instant messaging. Being Chinese and adopted, Jenny becomes obsessed with finding her birth mother since she hates her adapted mother (Laura T. Fisher). The doting father (Ron Butts) and the stupid, stoner boyfriend (Ian Forester) try to help Jenny cope with her bizarre behavior. The premise is much too thin, the situations become like a comic book episode and the over acting and musical volume almost overwhelm the production. At two hours, the unfunny work wears us out. The visual gimmicks including puppetry are not enough to offset the vulgar language, screamed too often. Only Scott Kennedy was terrific as he played several quirky characters in rich accents and deft humor.
The show gets so silly and preposterous then it changes its tone to be a sad, almost heart wrenching look a t Jenny’s pain. The clone of Jenny offers possibilities that are never explored. We are left with an unsatisfying journey that feels like we were robbed out of two hours of our time. Some techie types who enjoy trite mindless plays might laugh and be entertained—I found it nosey, silly and needlessly over written. Terrific talents were wasted with this material.
Not Recommended
Tom Williams
Tom99@chicagocritic.com for comments
Talk Theatre in Chicago podcast
Date Reviewed: March 8, 2007
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