Brett Neveu’s newest play (in a world premiere at A Red Orchid) gently suggests you choose your own interpretation of the contents therein. It’s not entirely clear what the play is about; Neveu isn’t offering pat answers, at any rate. Don’t take that as a drawback, but don’t walk in expecting a tidy narrative, either. Over the span of ninety minutes, the scenes cut back and forth between a training center that preps American travelers for the possibility of kidnapping overseas, and a coffee shop where the would-be victims—three women, professional types—meet during training breaks. In a broad sense, the play deals with the underlying feeling of a world gone crazy since 9/11, but Neveu is more specific in his focus. All politics are local, and I suppose all problems are local, too. Unless there is a terrorist directly in your face, it’s more likely that your own personal guilt, fury and life dissatisfaction will churn your stomach in knots. Is there such a thing as a tragedy of manners? Consider the things we do to one another in the name of polite conversation. The judgments that get passed off as friendly advice; the probing questions that imply there’s something wrong with you if you don’t want to share. The coffee klatch as a game of human Pac-Man—your fellow Americans as giant orbs with jaws that never stop flapping. At least, that’s what I got out of the show, directed by Edward Sobel with precise attention to Neveu’s banal rhythms of speech. The three women are terrific: Kirsten Fitzgerald, who is perfectly too loud and too much in her orange sherbet sweater poncho; Jennifer Engstrom, a brittle, high-strung yuppie in stiletto pumps; and Mierka Girten, whose buttoned-up, quiet personality masks a suppressed, thundering of rage. Everything is a digression, but there are two mini-anecdotes tucked in the script—one about a rape and murder at a nursing home, the other about a rabid dog attack—and couched within the play’s larger ambiguity, these monologues emerge as bright beacons of storytelling. (Nina Metz)
At A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 North Wells, (312)943-8722. This production is now closed.
Dueling in Dystopia: A Review of "Last Hermanos" at A Red Orchid Theatre Two Mexican American brothers who've grown up separately in the United States are together on the run, hoping to make it across the border to Mexico and escape the unfriendly confines that our country has become in a not-too-distant dystopian future.
