IT’S ONLY A PLAY
True enough. But sometimes a decent plot doesn’t hurt. On the night I attended Cloud 42’s excellent production of McNally’s play, the gentleman seated next to me was perplexed. He appeared to be in his late 50s and, like McNally’s taxi driver, seemed to be the only one in the audience who wasn’t associated in some way with the theater. “I think the actors are all excellent, and there are some really funny lines,” he commented at intermission. “But it’s not going anywhere. A play has to go up and down. It has to lead somewhere. This play just seems to reach a plateau and go flat the rest of the way. A play’s got to raise some questions before the intermission that you want answered. I don’t care about what’s going to happen next.” His remarks seemed every bit as true as the wisdom spewed forth by Bovary, McNally’s spokesman for the masses.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
That said, Cloud 42, under the superb, fast-paced direction of Judy O’Malley, gives McNally’s play as good a production as anybody could hope for. Each of the eight actors displays extraordinary wit and expert comic timing. Worth mentioning is Ted Kamp’s bad-boy director Finger, who knows exactly how to use self-deprecation to deify himself. A couple of the players go a touch overboard in their characterizations, but that fault is understandable given the lack of an intriguing plot.
