THE UNWILLING BRIDE and
It’s probably cynical to say that a first play is like a first pancake–you should throw it out and get to the good stuff. So I didn’t say it. But new works like these glib one-acts from Quando Productions suggest a warning to novice playwrights everywhere: if you write two-dimensional sitcoms, don’t be surprised when audiences wonder why they didn’t stay home.
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The Unwilling Bride, a first play by Chicagoan Gabrielle Young, is fairly yoked to the tube. Young’s life-style comedy concerns a couple, the patient Phil (Tim Glisson) and his restless lover Maggie (Anne Reifsteck), who’ve been together only two years but seem to have lost the bloom on the rose of their romance. Reeling from an early mid-life crisis or a two-year itch, Maggie craves fairy-tale love and molten passion, and fears that Phil has succumbed to terminal contentment.
This writer’s first play is pleasant at any rate. But the evening’s curtain raiser–Coming ‘Round Again, by Chicagoan J.S. Bergman–is a talky, mannered mess, a silly piece of fluff about another inert couple.
