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The play’s action comes to a complete halt when Brian and Sheila enact all the events as how Joe came into the world handicapped and what the couple did to try to get something done to help little Joe. In this series of enacted events, Vance Smith deftly and quite comically impersonated fastidious British doctors as well as a goofy German doctor. Smith demonstrated his versatile acting skills. His part is extremely over written but in Vance Smith’s hands Brian becomes a most impressive fellow. You’d be hard pressed to see a stronger acting performance. Smith makes his verbose character tolerable.

As problematic as the work’s premise is, I am confused by the tone. With the wildly over-played British accents and having women play males soldiers with an over-the-top manner and the prisoners, especially the women, I’m not sure if Our Country’s Good is suppose to be a comedy or a parody or a satire? But with so much cruelty toward the prisoners by most of the soldiers, it is hard to see the piece as more than melodrama.

After skipping the last couple of years of the Annual Chicago Young Playwrights Festival, now in its 27th year, I was delighted to see what the today’s teens view of the world is in 2014. It turned into a mixed bag of theatre from a moralizing work to a chilling one to a comic one.