EVELYN AND THE POLKA KING
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Olive’s story is the sort of one-sentence plot beginning screenwriters are encouraged to create: washed-up, recovering-alcoholic, former polka king Henry is united with young, perky Evelyn, the illegitimate daughter he never knew he had, and together they tour America’s heartland rebuilding his musical career, searching for her natural mother, and running from legal representatives of her adopted parents, who want their daughter back (along with the suitcase full of cash she stole).
Olive’s characters are so thin that to call them cartoonish risks offending cartoonists. (His last play at Steppenwolf, Killers, suffered from a similar lack of dimensionality.) We learn virtually nothing new about Evelyn or Henry over the course of their two-act odyssey, and they don’t seem to learn very much about themselves–except that performing polkas in front of an audience is a lot of fun and that if you steal a million dollars from your adoptive parents they’re going to work awfully hard to find you.
But there’s definitely something disheartening about seeing the considerable resources of Steppenwolf’s new theater–the sophisticated lighting, the large, flexible performance space, the backdrops that fly in and out in a flash–supporting a show with so little substance.
