The Casual Family
Hermit
at the Curious Theatre Branch
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It’s difficult to say which of the plays is hardest to take. They all indulge in gratuitous mystification: nonsensical language, unmotivated interactions, unexplained premises, relationships and situations rendered incomprehensible by the careful elision of crucial information. Brian Torrey Scott’s Understanding Shyness, for instance, is a series of short vignettes that seems at first to dramatize the small adventures of two men struggling with painful inhibitions. Before long, however, it discloses its true subject, which is Scott’s self-congratulatory attempt to wow us with coy, erudite non sequiturs that obscure a good deal more than they illuminate. A speech about the liquid nature of glass is repeated many times to no effect, except to add to the fog of empty portentousness that settles over the play and stays there.
Adam Vine’s Airland is a noisy attempt at comic absurdity centered around a big baseball-playing galoot who’s apparently been sent to Mars on a secret military mission. Vaguely reminiscent of David Greig’s far, far superior The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (as well as David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”), Airland fails because it never supplies essential information–like who half the characters are–much less the sense of reality that would have made the absurdity palpably absurd rather than merely silly.
Trouble is, that social point is undercut by Goodwin’s timid narrative. Sidewalk Etiquette centers on an effete gentrifier who’s dispensed with the niceties and simply started punching out the neighborhood. Almost superhuman in his blockbusting fury, he reduces a bunch of teenagers to tears and goes all Van Damme on a street musician. What Goodwin doesn’t seem to realize is, first, how extraordinarily funny and telling this conceit is; and second, how much further it can be taken. Why don’t the yuppie’s acts of violence escalate into real mayhem? Why isn’t he grinding up the bones of local gangbangers, a la Sweeney Todd, to make mortar for his ten-foot privacy wall? There’s all kinds of great grotesque potential here.
