Jacob Davis

By David Jacobi

Directed by Marti Lyons

Produced by Sideshow Theatre Company

Dark Comedy Tries to Have it Both Ways

I’ll say this for Sideshow’s world premiere of Mai Dang Lao: it never stops being interesting. This drama by David Jacobi is described as “chilling” and “terrifying,” and based on the real-life events that inspired it, that’s to be expected. In 2004, a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Kentucky, received a call from someone claiming to be a police officer. That person told the staff that an employee was suspected of theft, and the manager detained the employee in the office, where she was sexually assaulted by the manager’s boyfriend, in compliance with the fake police officer’s instructions. But Mai Dang Lao (the Chinese name for McDonald’s, and a particularly perplexing title) is about the exploitation of minimum wage workers more broadly, and attempts to represent this through satirical humor, until the last ten minutes of an eight-five minute play, when things suddenly get extremely bleak. The mixture doesn’t quite hold together upon examination.

The first voice we hear is that of an irate customer cussing out Sophie (Sarah Price), the cashier, because the person at the drive-through window took too long delivering her food. And no, says the voice, she will not pull up to the white line, the workers need to bring her sandwich and cup full of sauce to wherever in the drive-through she decides to idle her car. Sophie’s manager, Roy (Matt Fletcher), apologizes profusely, and reminds his workers of the importance of eliminating lag-time and customer complaints. Sophie says this is a perfect example of why she has already given her two-week notice.

Roy had long accused Sophie of not being a team-player, and now that she’s leaving, she barely pretends to respect him or the supervisor, Kara (Lanisa Renee Frederick). Not that there’s much reason why she should. Sophie’s obnoxious in a dozen ways, but Roy and Kara are established as clueless, self-righteous imbeciles from their first lines. Fletcher and Frederick’s performances will remind you of every unfair pseudo-authority figure exercising petty power you’ve ever encountered, so of course they immediately fall for “Officer Bill” (Jim Poole). Kara loves the drama of a police investigation and takes satisfaction in destroying people who think they’re entitled to special treatment like respect, and Roy sexually desires Sophie and is furious with her for servicing nearly every man they know except him. For Roy, Officer’s Bill’s order to strip-search and restrain Sophie is a dream come true, not that he’d ever admit it, even to himself.

Interspersed with scenes of Roy and Kara tormenting Sophie in the office are the much more mundane degradations in the kitchen. Mike (Andrew Goetten) is the closest thing to a friend Sophie has at McDonald’s. A handsome stoner whose dream is to buy a car so he can do doughnuts in the parking lot, Mike’s altered mental state and low expectations allow him to be more tolerant than Sophie of their miserable environment, but even he has limits. Nancy (Tyler Meredith), a nervous, awkward girl who’s being trained for a promotion, has a crush on Mike which he emphatically does not reciprocate. Not yet even a junior manager, Nancy loves nothing more than following Kara around and joining in on her bullying, although when they’re apart, Nancy shows more signs of a conscience and intellect. But those traits don’t wind up being useful in this script.

All the actors are perfect for their parts, the design is spot-on, and the humor is hilarious. Jacobi nails not only the capriciousness of authority, but also the absurdities of everyday interactions between bored people who don’t have much to talk about. The problem is that he was determined to incorporate the strip-search hoax into the story without making it the main focus. Of the show’s six characters, one is likable, but totally at fault for what happens to him, two are irritating, but get over-punished, and three are absolutely vile. In the exaggerated world of comedy, characters can be taken to extremes, but a call for compassion for food workers would have to make them all sympathetic (like Samuel Hunter’s Pocatello). The strip-search hoax really happened, but a serious exploration of the environment that allowed it would have been an undramatic soul-crushing grind (like Annie Baker’s The Flick). Mai Dang Lao uses its subjects for dark comedy for seventy minutes, and then attempts to shift into an overwrought, picturesque validation of their suffering at the very end. It’s a jarring conclusion, but not one which completely spoils the insights, enjoyment, and drama which came before.

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By Neil Connelly

Directed by John Wilson

Produced by Under the Rug Theatre Company

Playing in The Den Theatre, Chicago

An Architect Learns to Love Uptown

Most theater companies declare they have some kind of intention to serve their community, but it’s nice to see a new addition that has formed as many contacts as Under the Rug Theater Company for its inaugural production. Ride, a world premiere by first-time playwright Neil Connelly, depicts the aftermath of a biker’s death in a car crash. It is being produced with the support of biking, health, and transportation-related organizations, but uses its setting in a bike shop as an entry point for exploring the economic situation and culture of Uptown. Of course, what theatre-patrons are mainly concerned with is whether it is a good drama, but on that count, they need not worry.

Owning and operating an Uptown bike shop was not the career the family of Cal Brennan, the dead man, had wanted for him. His brother, Danny (Todd Wojcik), and sister, Molly (Annie Prichard), take in the punk aesthetic of Brennan’s Bikes with dismay and disdain, wondering what Cal must have been thinking to forego the upper-middle class lifestyles they’ve enjoyed. Even more baffling to them is Quill (Rose Freeman), a woman with an adolescent disposition who Cal permitted to live in the back of the shop with the dubious justification that she is a valued employee. Quill asserts she is also the part-owner, and while the siblings find this laughable, Cal’s estate will take some time to settle. In the meantime, Danny surprises Molly by wanting to keep the shop operational, at least for the time being, and thinks it would be easier to not antagonize Quill. When she challenges him to bet ownership of the shop on whether he can make it into a more successful business than Cal, he accepts.

Connelly’s dialogue is a little clunky at the beginning of the play, when he’s setting up the culture clash, but it improves as his characters take over. Wojcik’s performance makes clear that, while Danny is proud of his accomplishments as an architect, he felt stifled by the corporate environment. At the shop, he meets Riley (Alex Dauphin), a young woman who is more sensible than Quill and was likely Cal’s lover, but doesn’t pretend to prioritize her work at the shop, and Dell (Abe Elmourabit), a scavenger who credits Cal with turning his life around. As he becomes more comfortable in Uptown, Danny begins to appreciate the notion that Dell’s current situation may really be a massive improvement over however he lived previously, and that Cal was doing some good here. They debate the justness of the economic situation and their perceptions of each other, with Dell taking the position that City Hall mugs Uptown every day, so its residents have as much reason to be fearful of Danny’s clean-cut office look as he does of Dell’s hobo get-up. Still, as much as Danny grows in his understanding of the way the other side lives, his professionalism is undoubtedly improving the shop’s finances.

Ride hinges on Rose Freeman’s character, and her performance, down to Quill’s scratchy voice, is absolutely convincing. Quill can be charming, in a child-like way, and Danny believes he is making progress with her. Their tragedy is that he doesn’t have enough experience with people like her to recognize that her behavior indicates depression and alcoholism, and that nagging and setting a good example for her won’t treat those problems. Neil Connelly has created a nuanced portrait of the intersection between young people who stayed middle-class, and those whose choices, lack of opportunities, or personal problems caused them to fall away from it. Director John Ross Wilson, who also designed the set, guides these characters along a journey that makes us empathize with them, while still recognizing the flaws on all sides. Ideally, this production would move to Uptown, since doing it in hipsterville complicates its message. But Ride also deserves to be in a venue where it will get attention, and hopefully, Under the Rug Theatre Company will continue to build on their success.

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By Gary Mitchell

Directed by Jeri Frederickson

Produced by Irish Theatre of Chicago

Playing at The Den Theatre, Chicago

Journey to Northern Ireland Like Visiting a Different Planet

When Gary Mitchell’s play In a Little World of Our Own was first produced in February of 1998, it established him as one of the first major contemporary playwrights of Northern Ireland. Debuting only months before the Good Friday Agreement, In a Little World of Our Own probes a question that has been at the forefront of tragedians’ mind since the time of Aeschylus: whether laws are the best tool for establishing a just peace. Even with the end of The Troubles in sight, the characters in Mitchell’s drama, set in his own hometown of Rathcoole, exist in a world of clannish retaliation and communal violence. Transplanted to Irish Theatre of Chicago in 2016, the drama becomes a thriller that unfolds with a feeling of inevitability, and which depends on assertions about the culture in Rathcoole that sound very odd to outsiders.

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By William Shakespeare

Directed by Sean Holmes

Music and Sound by Tom Haines and Ross Hughes

Produced by Filter Theatre and Chicago Shakespeare Theater

A Play as an Excuse for Play

Filter Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night is billed as a “raucous” hybrid between Shakespeare’s comedy, a rock concert, and an improv sketch show. That kind of humor is best-suited to people, probably mostly young ones, who are familiar with the play, but want to see it used in a highly informal manner. That’s not a bad idea with a comedy, but the Filter production, now at Chicago Shakespeare as part of the Shakespeare 400 Festival, hardly derives any of its humor from Shakespeare’s text, or even his characters and situations. Instead, the six actors and two musicians use the play’s heavy focus on music (the food of love) as an excuse to play with sound for ninety minutes.

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Adapted by Chris Hainsworth

From the Book by James Leo Herlihy

Directed by Christopher M. Walsh

Produced by Lifeline theatre, Chicago

A Confused, Hallucinatory Midnight Cowboy

Midnight Cowboy is one of the most famous and highly-acclaimed classic movies for both its storytelling and for the pushing boundaries of what was considered proper to depict in 1969 (it originally was rated X). However, Lifeline Theatre is mostly in the business of adapting novels for the stage, and James Leo Herlihy’s book is quite different from the film adaptation people are used to. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; theatre is less bound to literal representations and allows characters to be re-interpreted by different actors. But Lifeline may have bit off more than it could chew in this original adaptation. While film uses whiteouts to indicate flashbacks and clearly shows different locations, adaptor Chris Hainsworth’s script is difficult to follow, and the audience’s prior knowledge of the movie is unlikely to be of much help.

What is the same is that Joe Buck (Zach Livingston) leaves his native Texas in hope of becoming a high-end prostitute in New York City for an exclusively female clientele. He’s definitely got the face, physique, and charm, but he’s dumb as a brick and easy to manipulate. Though he manages to get laid within minutes of arriving, he winds up giving money to his customer, and soon realizes he has no idea what he’s doing. He appears to catch a lucky break when the chronically coughing cripple Enrico Salvatore “Ratso” Rizzo (Adam Marcantoni) directs him to a pimp he calls O’Daniel (Gregory Madden), but the man turns out to be a crackpot preacher, and Ratso makes off with Joe’s money. When Joe encounters Ratso again later, both their fortunes have declined even further, and they form an odd friendship/chaste romance, with Ratso as Joe’s new, but equally inept manager.

But it takes nearly until Act II for the play to get to this familiar ground. Most of Act I centers on Joe’s relationship with Perry (Jack Miggins), a gay prostitute who specialized in sadism, and who attempted to teach Joe to exploit the fantasies the johns (or janes) aren’t comfortable acknowledging. Usually Lifeline’s set designs are flexible enough to make changes in location clear, and Joe Schermoly’s has plenty of sliding panels and transformable furniture, but director Christopher M. Walsh couldn’t find a way to communicate where or when these scenes fit into the story. I later learned that they occurred while Joe was still in Texas, but they are interspersed with O’Daniel’s preaching and earlier flashbacks, and are structured in a way that makes Perry appear to comment on Joe’s transition to servicing gay men and tutelage under Rizzo, which happens in New York. Furthermore, while Miggins fully transforms himself vocally and in his mannerisms to deliver Perry’s snide coldness, the fight choreography between him and Livingston isn’t quite believable, which undermines what is supposed to be a significant moment on Joe’s backstory.

Besides that Hainsworth and Walsh attempt to borrow from the book while maintaining the movie’s heavy use of flashbacks and audio association, they also let characters prattle on for too long. Most of the creeps Joe meets are also bores, and while his reaction to the closeted elderly businessman Towny (Patrick Blashill) is more sympathetic than in other versions due to the man’s sheer obnoxiousness, O’Daniel’s preaching was not something we needed fourth and fifth helpings of. Megan DeLay, as one of the few women of means interested in Joe, calls him a symbol to his face, and composes her own literary critique of her interactions with him in real time. Oddly, it’s a bit of a relief when Joe is allowed to talk for extended periods, because he’s one of the few people who’s not too egotistical for his reflections to have value.

Despite this adaptation’s flaws, there are good things about it. Livingston and Marcantoni are quite appealing actors, and having Joe Buck before you in the flesh does produce a much more visceral effect than seeing him in a movie. He’s more vulnerable like this. Sarah Espinoza’s sound design gives Blashill pleasant and poignant country songs to play on his guitar, much like the movie’s soundtrack. The final scene is moving, and Rizzo’s gruff mother-hen attitude stands out from the cruelty and indifference of the other characters. People who have read the book will probably also have a much easier time following the action and understanding what is intended with each character. But on its own, this adaptation is wobbly, and the choices in production don’t help illuminate the script.

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By Mark Roberts

Directed by Ian Streicher

Produced by Fair Trade Productions

Playing at The Den Theatre, Chicago

A Dark Comedy for the New South

Champaign County native Mark Roberts has made a name for himself by producing and writing for hit TV sit-coms Mike & Molly and Two and a Half Men, as well as dark stage dramas like Parasite Drag (which his company is staging this fall). Now he has returned to Chicago to star in the regional premiere of his play New Country, which is billed as a comedy, but has some very dark aspects. There’s plenty of humor in this story about the inner circle of a young country star, and structurally, the early part of the play bears more than a passing resemblance to Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor, although its humor is never farcical. But the seriousness of the situations and suffering Roberts raises in his play isn’t given the focus it needs in its brief ninety minutes, resulting in a show that is a comedy in a similar sense to how Anton Chekhov used the word to describe his plays.

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Directed and Devised by Michael Rohd

Produced by Steppenwolf Theatre Company

Determinism? There’s an App for That

The terms “audience participation” and “group discussion” tend to get bad reactions from theatre-goers, but when used by a knowledgeable director for the right purpose, they can have rewarding results. The Compass, a new show devised by Michald Rohd for Steppenwolf’s Young Adult series, asks the audience to directly grapple with such thorny problems as determinism, and whether free will is relevant in the criminal justice system. With the guidance of well-trained actor-facilitators, the audience become jurors in a fascinating case set a few years in the future. The issues raised are fodder for passionate discussion, and the play itself is the sort of strong story-telling which inspires young people to see the possibilities in using art to explore political issues.

Ada (Cruz Gonzalez-Cadal), a developer, and her entrepreneur partner (Tim Hopper), have launched an app called Compass. This program mines all the information a user enters in social media accounts, and can be used to make predictions about what a person would do in any given situation. Not “should” or “will” do, the entrepreneur is careful to point out, but “would.” They market it as a way to remove the stress from making decisions. Why go through all the trouble of thinking something out and agonizing over uncertainties, trade-offs, and missed opportunities, when you have a device that tells you what decision you would inevitably make anyway? It not only saves time, it saves emotional energy. Best of all, Compass can be linked to your friends’ accounts and celebrities’ public profiles, so you can learn what other people would do in your place, as well, and what they perceive you would do.

Marjan (Ariana Burks), the teenage girl on trial, used Compass to arrive at her decision to call in a fake bomb threat to her school. The result was the usual chaos: wasted police resources which could have been used on actual emergencies, wasted resources for a school system that was already stretched to the breaking point, unexpected disruption for working parents of special needs students who couldn’t simply go home, and so forth. However, Marjan is no mere prankster. Over the course of her trial, we see that she is a smart young activist who has become frustrated that her complaints about the school’s safety have been ignored. To shake the adults out of their complacency, Marjan wrote a detailed guide to smuggling guns into the building, which she claims is already common knowledge among the students, anyway, and happens frequently. Naturally, her teacher (Hopper) refused to publish it, so Marjan put it online, figuring the other students would be mature enough to understand her point, and grown-ups would finally address the issue. Things did not go as she hoped.

Marjan is now facing a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in an adult prison if we convict her. Her defense is that she would not have made her decision if she had not become so reliant on Compass. The prosecutor says that’s nonsense. From a legal perspective, Marjan would clearly be guilty if not for the Compass issue, and her choice of defense is a long-shot, but the moral justification for the crime itself is arguable. As for Compass, it’s clearly a way to get people thinking about the process by which they make decisions, and how much responsibility we have for that. It’s an unsettling subject for people of any age, and one well worth exploring.

The audience is divided into ten sections, and together, each section makes up a single juror. Throughout, the facilitators give us a few minutes to discuss what we’ve seen, and that time limit keeps the debate much more focused than the usual audience talk-backs. The high quality of the acting also inspires the audience to take its role seriously; Burks is completely believable, and the facilitators balance a fine line between parody and earnestness. At the performance I attended, the final vote was close, and the arguments from both the audience members and their facilitator proxies were intense, but respectful and thought-provoking. Though Compass is fictional, it is true that people have theoretical control over the algorithms which determine what information they receive online, but they usually fail to exercise that control. This is a commendable instance in which a youth theatre show has made a difficult, complex question understandable and relevant to teens without insulting their intelligence, or ours. The deliberations may have different results at the high school showings, but the balance of the viewpoints presented is sure to keep up the quality of the discourse. There are a few public performances remaining, so older people have the chance to weigh in, too.

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