Chicago Dramatists Workshop.
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Valentino Heart is Johannes Marlena’s poorly planned, too-casual conversation between a couple of actors, one an idealist, the other a slacker. Though their forced and self-conscious conflicts lead nowhere, at least Pete Kanetis and Sara Devlin, directed by Paul Frellick, suggest a shared history. Evan Blake’s The Sound Called Music is underlong and overwritten, an unfocused look at a May-December relationship founded on loneliness and loud music. Marjiie Rynearson’s Julie, cluttered with too many characters and more novelistic than dramatic, contrasts two mothers who lose their children to urban dooms, then pool their grief in an ironic reconciliation scene. Amy Ludwig’s staging benefits from Millicent D. Hurley’s eloquent take on Dorothy, an anguished woman trying to preserve her daughter’s memory. But the play goes wrong when it abandons impressionism for melodrama. Gary Taylor’s predictable The Taster’s Choice is excruciatingly padded and shallower than a sitcom, a silly and endless look at infighting at a cereal company’s test kitchen. Even newscaster Janet Davies, feisty as a control-freak boss in Drew Martin’s broad staging, can’t lift this bit of fluff.
–Lawrence Bommer
