LONELY PLANET
Northlight Theatre
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Lonely Planet is written with compassion and concern; Dietz has known his unfair share of young people who died well before their time, and his sorrow clearly motivates the play. But he’s failed to transform his thoughts into believable or compelling dramatic action. Fatally, this two-person character study is populated not by real people but by oratorical alter egos who represent the writer’s conflicting impulses; they speak in tidily crafted, unspontaneous mini- essays posing as conversation.
The chairs, piled higher and higher in every scene, dramatize the obsessive-compulsive complex that some people develop under stress; they also dramatize the mounting death toll. In Ionesco’s The Chairs, which Carl cites in a telling reference, a mass of chairs represent an existential emptiness; here, every chair means a life that’s gone.
On a related note: Songwriter Brian Lasser will be honored with a memorial on February 1 at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont, at 7 PM. Lasser, a former Chicagoan whose clever and sensitive music delighted many here before he relocated to New York with his partner, singer Karen Mason, died of AIDS-related complications in November.
