Big Love
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This ancient tale–and its rendition by Aeschylus in his drama The Suppliant Women–is the inspiration for Charles L. Mee’s offbeat, uneven, but compelling comedy-drama Big Love. Commissioned for the 2000 Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville–and directed there by Les Waters, who’s transplanted that production largely intact to the intimate Owen Bruner Goodman auditorium–Big Love is an imaginative reworking of the myth and its implications, which are both timeless and oddly immediate. When Mee wrote the script, he had in mind the plight of Bosnian women fleeing a brutal campaign of rape and genocide, a tragedy that had many Americans clucking in somewhat detached sympathy. The play takes on new resonance now, with its depiction of an affluent, complacent society being drawn unwillingly into conflict.
Setting the action in an elegant villa on the Italian Riviera, Mee focuses on three sisters who speak for their mostly unseen 47 siblings. These women are not the impoverished victims we think of when the subject turns to refugees; they’re pampered, privileged, and pretty as pictures in their white wedding gowns. Handsome, dark-haired, fiercely independent Thyona (K.J. Sanchez) is the hard-liner who won’t even consider honoring a contract she considers unjust. Glamorous, blond, sexy Olympia (Aimee Guillot) is ambivalent: she agrees with Thyona on principle but likes men and wants to be married. And Lydia (Carolyn Baeumler) is a loving soul increasingly uncomfortable with the die-hard militance Thyona espouses.
Mee would be well aware of this conclusion. A scholar bred in suburban Chicago and trained at Harvard, he’s demonstrated a particular affinity for Greek tragedy, as evidenced in his adaptation of Euripides’ Orestes, which Roadworks turned into a rock musical. It seems unlikely he’d settle for a feel-good ending, and in fact Mee is quoted in Goodman publicity material saying, “My plays are broken, jagged,…filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up.” For all its breathless playfulness and athletic energy (Jean Isaacs choreographed the tumbling routines and dances) and its appealingly bright design (credit Annie Smart for the sets, James Schuette for the costumes, and Robert Wierzel for the lights), Big Love is a play whose dark underpinnings nag at the conscience long after the laughter has subsided.
