PLAYWRIGHTS FOR THE ’90S
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Evan Blake’s Strangers in the Night, sweetly directed by Sandra Grand and intelligently acted by Patricia’ Donegan and Ron Wells, is not only the most integrated production of the five included in the Chicago Dramatists Workshop’s sixth annual “Playwrights for the ’90s” showcase, it’s also the only genuinely good-humored one. This program includes plenty of laughs, but generally they have an edge.
In Roger Rueff’s Mary Had, two men are confined by unknown oppressors in what appears to be an oversize shower stall. Denver–a white collar, suburban family man in some unnamed sinister profession that troubles his conscience–clings to the belief that his incarceration is only temporary. Newt, his cell mate, has the weary solipsism of a lifetime inmate and has even invented his own private theology. “You created your own God?” Denver asks incredulously. Newt shrugs, “It’s not like you need a license or anything.” To pass the time, they discuss their names, jobs, the economy, music (Newt sings nursery songs, always leaving off the last word–a habit that irks Denver), the attractions of suicide, and the meaning of life and death. From time to time they hear ominous noises outside the locked door and sight guards overhead, one of whom Newt taunts just once too often. Eventually their conversation comes to an end, but we’re never given any clue about the questions troubling Denver and us: who holds these men prisoner, and what do they want? Rueff makes vague allusions to the erosion of civil rights in a complacent society, even suggesting that Denver’s tolerance of others’ opinions may be responsible for his arrest. But the enemy remains so generic as to be unidentifiable, and Rueff never specifies a context for this existential conflict. We’re left with a coupla paranoid guys sittin’ around talking–waiting for Big Brother Godot, so to speak. Director John Swanbeck and actors Jason Wells and David Barr make this short play entertaining, but ultimately they can’t make it satisfying.
