BRUTALITY OF FACT
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Sometimes this sameness works to Reddin’s advantage, as in Big Time, where the blandness of the characters becomes a wonderful comic critique of superficial, amoral white middle-class professionals during the last anxious years of the Reagan “recovery.” At other times it interferes with Reddin’s artistic ambitions. He falters whenever he tries to plumb his characters’ emotional depths simply because there are no depths to be plumbed. He doesn’t create striking, three-dimensional characters; he creates caricatures: a sadistic entrepreneur (Life and Limb), a shallow yuppie (Big Time), a grandiose director (Black Snow).
This is the problem with Brutality of Fact, Reddin’s brittle, witty play about two middle-aged sisters and their mother trying to cope with divorce, aging, and death. Its best moments come when Reddin wrings laughs out of his characters’ contradictions and their fumbled attempts to deal with their lives. The scene in which Maggie, the alcoholic sister, flees an AA meeting because she doesn’t want to pour her heart out to strangers and then pours her heart out to a stranger in a bar is priceless.
When Reddin is content to amuse, the show soars. When he decides it’s time to get serious, the show stalls. And there’s nothing director Michael Maggio or his cast of accomplished comic actors–Leslie Lyles is fabulous as Maggie–can do about it.
