SINS OF THE SAINTS
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A poetry professor of mine used to say that an image is its own best container of meaning, an idea Chicago theater artists would do well to study. Too much of Chicago theater–notably among the smaller companies–remains in the stranglehold of the 20-year-old kitchen-sink aesthetic, which sees lurid displays of emotion as the beginning and end of drama. But without a meaningful visual context, such acting rarely rises above its most literal aspects. Even the brightest performance will be reduced to an inconsequential glimmer if it’s unimaginatively staged or lost in a sea of visual clutter. Directors ask us to watch their work, but too often give us little to look at.
In Sins of the Saints, a new one-act about a pathologically self-absorbed writer suffering the aftereffects of childhood sexual abuse, writer and director Stephen Tomac delivers one extraordinarily powerful image. Kirkaby, the protagonist, sits in his underwear on his living-room sofa while the figure of Father Patrick, his childhood priest, stands behind him, coolly instructing an imaginary 12-year-old Kirkaby to remove his clothes piece by piece. Whether Kirkaby willfully ignores or simply doesn’t hear the priest is left intentionally ambiguous, but the adult Kirkaby “coincidentally” puts on each item of clothing just as the priest tells his younger self to take it off.
