Playwright Edward Crosby Wells cites “Flowers Out of Season” as his first play, which he dug out of a box nearly twenty years after the seeds first “began to germinate.” Now in it’s world premiere, directed by Madrid St. Angelo for the People’s Theater, “Flowers” has grown into a nearly incomprehensible mess of soap-opera melodrama and ludicrous non sequiturs, touted as “magic and mystery.” The play follows a chain-smoking, often shirtless, poverty-stricken and perhaps morally bankrupt man named Buck as he searches for salvation in a small New Mexico. In act one, Buck and his wife Dawn circle around aimlessly, seemingly just killing time until it’s time to kill. The second act fares even worse, feeling at times like the opening scene to a soft-core porn—the fairly vapid conversation between Buck and Daisy, the sex starved, mentally unstable housewife he picked up at local health-food store, erupts into inexplicable violence and misogyny, book ending a sadly clunky and bizarrely un-sexy tango/dry-humping event that left my skin crawling. Despite several attempts to invest and reinvest myself in the “mysticism,” I was left disappointed, disturbed and confounded. (Valerie Jean Johnson)
At EP Theater, 1820 S. Halsted, 312-850-4299. This production is now closed.
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