DOGTOWN
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With their gift for creating dozens of vivid characters in the span of two hours, the Dogs deserve better than Stephen Serpas’s collection of overwritten, unsurprising, unreal urban fantasies. Collected under the title Dogtown, his ten tales (and prologue) leave no city-life cliche unevoked. We meet the heartless drug dealer, the nerdy bag boy, the bullying store manager, the sexually ravenous housewife, the lovable, goofy bartender, and various colorful, goofy blue-collar types in the seedy but homey neighborhood drinking establishment with a quaint name, Rich’s First One Today.
Does Serpas ever leave his apartment? Only someone totally unfamiliar with contemporary city life could create this crowd of phony people, led by the stock character to end all stock characters, the eccentric but wise wanderer, mapmaker, and product spokesman Granville, whose Pepperidge Farm demeanor (bow tie, pressed shirt, clipped New England accent) make him a less crabby, considerably less interesting cousin of the Stage Manager in Our Town and of all the crusty old men pushing oatmeal, upscale cookies, and “old-fashioned” lemonade on the tube.
But the greatest shame of all is the skillful way Serpas’s pap is translated to the stage, with beaucoup directorial wit and the sort of full-throttle commitment from the performers that’s sadly lacking from so much of Chicago theater today. But being fully committed to bad material is like being faithful to a cheating spouse: it’s a foolish waste of time and a vexation to the spirit.
