RATIONAL MALAISE
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This lurking malaise is the best part of Ross’s plays. Second best is that they’re funny in an easy, familiar way. But this is the first time Ross, a poetry and fiction writer, has written for the stage, and all of her plays are short, as if she were afraid to jump into a full-length drama. And because they’re so short, they often sell their ideas short. Ross creates a general impression, but she doesn’t take her stories to their natural conclusion.
“Lip Bomb,” the one piece that goes beyond malaise, needs this sense of conclusion the most. Actress Deborah Goldstein plays a young woman on the brink–or perhaps in the middle–of a nervous breakdown. She smokes nonstop, hates herself, wants to die. In a shaking, rough voice she tells us about her day, how she tried to find an open church because she longed to be in a large dark place. In church, she rationalizes, she could cry for no reason at all; people would invent reasons when they saw her and wouldn’t think she was crazy.
Ross has a refreshingly light touch. She’s not didactic, nor does she feed her ideas too easily to her audience. Some of the performances are great, others are adequate, which leads me to the conclusion that Rational Malaise is another of those Chicago productions that hint at a lot of artistic potential but don’t deliver the goods. Each of these short pieces seems like it could be a scene in a larger, more satisfying play. On their own, however, they only tease the audience.
