Michael Pacas and Sandy Elias/Photo: Johnny Knight
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Are you a trout or a carp? Believe it or not, it’s a fundamental question in this new play by Jayme McGhan, which leaves no fishing metaphor unturned. The show begins innocently enough as a comedy about a family of fishing enthusiasts in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. But it suddenly becomes deathly serious when the two airline-mechanic brothers Carl and Chucky learn that they’re about to lose everything in a series of layoffs that will affect them as well as 500 of their coworkers.
The play is more than timely, with echoes of Occupy Wall Street and the 99%, the play ultimately comes down to how this family copes with the news. In fact it’s an almost overfull ode to the American Dream, this time writ small and embodied by a piece of land on the shores of a lake. But by the time you discover how Carl has taken matters into his own hands, you either have to swim past the play’s bait, or swallow it, hook, line and sinker. (Neal Ryan Shaw)
Stage Left Theatre at Theater Wit, 1229 West Belmont, (773)975-8150. Through April 1.
Stage Top 5: May 2021 May brings flowers and the first buds of live performance in over a year.
Stage Top 5: February 2019 The hits keep coming: August Wilson's blues-tinged vision of Chicago in the twenties, a locally-set sequel-of-sorts from the playwright of "The Madres," and a rock musical from the company that brought you "We're Gonna Die" are just a selection of the many openings scheduled for this most-truncated of months.
