Playwrights for the ’90s
The evolution of the efficient, sophisticated But I Get Benefits into the lolling, wasteful The Office typifies a disheartening trend in Chicago playwriting as we charge toward the end of the 20th century. Mainstream Chicago playwrights glut the stage with words, characters, and effects but produce precious little drama. They pen conversations, rarely dialogue. They give their characters platforms but impede their desire to act. Most local playwrights would be much better off writing slice-of-life short stories, where they could wax rhapsodic to their hearts’ content.
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The most common tactic, evident in almost all the pieces in “Playwrights for the ’90s,” is to encourage the characters to explain their every impulse–often in excruciating detail–rather than allow those impulses to drive the characters forward. Taylor’s miserable office worker never said a word, but he did spend the entire play trying to keep busy to counteract his own boredom; an occasional sigh was all we needed to feel the depth of his despair. Hoffower’s characters, by contrast, do almost nothing; they slouch in their chairs, stare off into space, and announce again and again that they are “beyond bored.” Hoffower confuses drama with reiteration of the obvious. For Taylor’s protagonist, staving off ennui was a life-and-death struggle; if he sat still for too long, he would literally be sucked into his desk. Hoffower’s characters seem to need nothing but a forum to tell us what we can already see for ourselves.
Instead of drama, we get endless fiddling to create an effect. In Louise Rozett’s one-man Rocky Sr., the good-old-boy title character begins by telling us from beyond the grave that his wife shot him through the head with his gun. In Keith Huff’s Kultur Tour, an Austrian exchange student gets drunk on his first day with his American family, urinating and vomiting on the kid in the bunk below him. In Tina Fey’s 15 Minutes in the Age of Reason, an unapologetically autocratic Catherine the Great is exhumed to witness a decidedly minor usurpation among self-appointed royalty in a trendy New York disco. These writers’ grotesque exaggerations often create startling, even thought-provoking moments; Fey’s musings about the incompatibility of democracy and artistic greatness, while somewhat derivative, are particularly beguiling. But these bold, eye-catching strokes rarely sharpen the focus or illuminate larger truths. Once you remove the flashy packaging you’re left with little but a crumpled-up pile of flashy packaging.
