The Sweat Offensive
For two years the folks at Pretzelrod Productions have been doing just that: bringing us an evening’s worth of short monologues written and performed by a group of witty actresses–the Sweat Girls–who proved in shows like I’m Sweating Under My Breasts, Who Does She Think She Is? and Sweat Dreams that they have the intelligence, self-knowledge, and sense of humor to give even their most personal stories universal appeal.
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Which makes Pretzelrod’s dismal current show all the more disappointing. This 26-hour evening of overwritten, underrehearsed monologues definitely lacks universal appeal. But it’s not the Sweat Girls’ fault. For some reason they’re sitting this one out: six local male performers have been recruited to do a male version of the Sweat Girls’ shows–“I’m Sweating Under My Pecs,” as it were. Unfortunately the Sweat Boys don’t, on the whole, have their female counterparts’ gifts as storytellers. At least, half of them don’t–and that’s enough to tip The Sweat Offensive into that gray area between the “can miss” and “must miss” categories.
Nor was Ellison the only performer who’d failed to learn his lines by opening night. Gregg Mierow and Peter Greenberg also stumbled and stuttered their way through their pieces, and Greenberg too had to call offstage for hints of what he should say next. Even Phil Ridarelli, an Equity actor known for the strength and self-assurance of his performances, seemed insecure. As he coughed and muttered through a wonderful reminiscence about working among the disabled at the Little Village in Palatine, I began to wonder if these weren’t symptoms of some psychological plague infecting all us straight, white men. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s plague of insomnia in One Hundred Years of Solitude, only this one’s a plague of cluelessness. Which is particularly ironic, because self-knowledge is abundant in the Sweat Girls’ work.
Doyle doesn’t tell these stories for sympathy. Instead, he beams as he tells them, like a survivor of some awful natural disaster, relating again and again how he escaped annihilation by the skin of his teeth. And you can’t help but love him for it. By having gone to hell and back and having lived to tell about it–with wit and understanding–he gives us all hope that we’ll do the same when our difficult times come. And that’s all you can really ask of a good storyteller.
