This 90 minute work is filled with rich poetic language, a few laughs and a spirit that suggests that dreaming and the effort to reach the sun – no matter how much one may get burned – is superior to not trying. The living must have dreams and taking risks is necessary for happiness. Beau wears a ski mask to hide his real pain. He realizes that he can love and be loved if he dreams and takes action toward personal reconciliation for his painful secret.
It took effort to get me past the strong Our Town references about everyday life in small town America. But once I realized Eno’s take on the life cycle focuses on the middle part – that part between birth and death of the life cycle – I began to appreciate deeper levels of Middletown. Eno emphasizes how we attempt to articulate our lives through human speech.
The show moves slowly as it is filled with references to major works of English literature that fuels Rita’s newly found intellectual freedom as she move up from a working class environment to the intellectual world of the intelligentsia.
Without giving away more of the plot, let me say that Good Boys and True is an indictment of privilege and wealth to give young men a warped sense of life that easily allows a teen to use a working class girl as an object of pleasure. The play covers the gray areas of how and why the societal structure both fosters and enables elitist behavior that doesn’t require owning or taking personal responsibility for one’s actions.
What about the show? Well, it was good. Damn good, really. First we had to wait a minute, until the stage had sufficient fog. But then they took to the stage, James Allan with a thick, white, glowing mic cable, like something out of Bladerunner.
In this insanely hostile world, Marisol (Marta Evans) is a middle class educated soul struggling to make it in a culture plagued by war and scarcity. She is a good soul just trying to find peace and saftey. When her guardian angel (Leslie Ann Sheppard) informs her that she will leave as Marisol’s protector to join the heavenly battle against a senile and dying God, Marisol’s security is threatened.
As we go back in time, we see Evan as he engages with his close friends in a variety in seven dramatically varied entanglements or encounters with his adapted gay family. From close friendships to sexual encounters, Evan grows as a person through the advise and shared experiences with this close-knit group.
Robert Plant is an interesting choice for the Ravinia Festival. On the one hand, he and his bandmates Jimmy Page, John Bonham and John Paul Jones defined behemoth self-indulgent rock in the ‘70s as Led Zeppelin. However, he’s now surrounded himself with massive names in country, folk and bluegrass and creates music that is, if not calm, complacent.
As part of Lanford Wilson’s Talley Trilogy, Fifth of July is the 1977 gathering of the Talley clan in their Lebanon, Missouri home. The clan is once more in turmoil. The play centers on Ken Talley (Stephen Dunn), a gay paraplegic Vietnam survivor who has inherited the decaying summer home.
The satire gets quite thick as Marcus takes on the persona of an Asian cultural believer who becomes more ‘Asian’ that Hwang. This is were the plot gets too self-serving as it wonders into the story of Hwang’s banker father (played with gusto by Joesph Anthony Foronda). David Rhee is fine as Hwang as he traverses through Hwang’s ups and downs as he struggles to make the concept of Yellow Face relevant.