The Violet Hour
Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In The Violet Hour Greenberg also throws a lot of details at the audience, expecting us to put them all together but without supplying sufficient stakes. Set in 1919 on the fringes of the New York literary world, the play concerns John Pace Seavering, a young would-be publisher (ably played by peppy, preppy Josh Hamilton) fresh out of the army; his friend Denis McCleary, a talented but emotionally erratic Irish-American writer (an amusing Kevin Stark); and John’s sometime lover Jessie Brewster, an African-American singer (a role that gives the charismatic Ora Jones a chance to do several star turns). The young publisher has a cheap little office–at Steppenwolf an excuse for Robert Brill’s gorgeous set, all wood and glass and fading paint–and an amusing, efficient, whiny assistant, Gidger (Tim Hopper). But John has yet to publish a book.
None of the characters is an actual historical figure, but all are strongly suggestive of historical personages. Denis is a bit like F. Scott Fitzgerald–he even has a mentally unstable Zelda-like girlfriend–and a bit like Thomas Wolfe: the manuscript of Denis’s first novel fills several boxes, not unlike the leviathan Wolfe once delivered to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. Meanwhile the young publisher resembles Perkins, though his source might also be New Directions founder James Laughlin.
I sometimes get the same claustrophobic feeling from Greenberg’s plays. John is very much a man trapped in his own upper-class, well-educated world. As is brilliant but poor Denis: eager for success within this world, he can’t see that it won’t solve his drinking problem or give his fiancee emotional stability. Greenberg himself seems trapped in the world of glib, self-referential postmodern writing. Maybe that’s his point–that texts refer to nothing but themselves.
Still, Greenberg’s game playing makes for interesting theater. The same cannot be said for 6, the Gift Theatre Company’s tiresome version of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Retelling Pirandello’s self-reflective story–about a rehearsal interrupted by the play’s characters, abandoned by their author but eager to finish their tales–this young company fails to retain either the intellectual headiness of the original or its emotional power. William Nedved’s adaptation is peppered with jokes about the Chicago theater scene and about Our Town being the play interrupted when the characters wander in. And maybe if director Jonathan Berry had been able to give the performances a greater sense of urgency, the cleverness of this approach would have been more compelling.
