A Red Orchid Theatre’s “Turret,” with Travis A. Knight and Michael Shannon/Photo: Fadeout Media and Jesus Santos
It starts with an attention-grabbing tableau: a buff young man jogging on a treadmill contained within a large metal cylinder, with sensors on his head wired to a computer display. The young man, we learn, is named Rabbit (Travis A. Knight)—but he seems more like a hamster on a wheel, or perhaps a lab rat involved in some kind of scientific experiment.
By final curtain, it feels like it’s the play itself—A Red Orchid Theatre’s world premiere of “Turret,” a “survivalist thriller” written and directed by Levi Holloway—that’s the experiment, with the audience members as subjects. “Turret” asks viewers just how twisty and opaque a narrative maze they’re willing to endure to reach the cheese at the end, which is the presence of movie and TV star Michael Shannon, who plays Green, Rabbit’s mentor and father figure. Early on, this critic—and I suspect a large percentage of the crowd—stopped trying to figure out what was going on plotwise and accepted the show for what it is: a self-indulgent shaggy-dog story peopled by enigmatic characters, seasoned with an off-putting combination of mawkishness and gore.
If “Turret” were played for laughs, as a spoof of survivalist paranoia and sci-fi silliness, it could work. But the show takes its thin scenario–about a dystopian future, with a poisoned Earth filled with monstrous intruders (mutants? zombies? aliens?), who are resisted by bunker-dwelling militia types holding out until nonexistent reinforcements arrive–seriously, teasing us with profound-seeming questions that it never deigns to answer. Exactly what happened to the planet? Who or what is Rabbit, and what is his relationship with the older, hard-bitten Green? Why does the oft-repeated query—What is your mother’s name?—elicit such a stormy but amnesiac response? Why does Green alternately dote on the boy and seek to destroy him?
A case could be made that the outward circumstances of the play are not to be taken literally—that it’s all an old-fashioned Freudian metaphor for the Oedipal tension that shadows family dynamics, as the son grows up and develops into a potential rival of the father. Shannon captures Green’s duality, morphing from grim-faced, guilt-inducing Bad Dad to affectionate, even whimsical Good Dad, as in an overlong scene in which the pair, rendered goofy by cabin fever, enact a high-school dance in their claustrophobic underground lair (designed by Grant Sabin, whose lovingly detailed, industrial-style set is complemented by Mike Durst’s cool, grayish-blue lighting).
But “Turret” goes in so many directions that the themes cancel each other out: the breakdown of family and community, the emptiness of virtual existence, xenophobia, smothering over-parenting… even cruelty to animals figures here, with a pet cat who is murdered twice, through the magic of the play’s elaborately recursive, déjà vu plot structure.
A Red Orchid Theatre’s “Turret,” with Travis A. Knight, Michael Shannon and Lawrence Grimm/Photo: Fadeout Media and Jesus Santos
The real déjà vu quality of the work is in its derivative relationship to Samuel Beckett’s 1957 “Endgame,” the Irish master’s evocation of creeping mortality and generational succession in a postwar world stripped of illusion and rendered hostile and absurd. “Turret” is clearly modeled on “Endgame,” but without the older play’s insight and poetry. Beckett’s allegory has been turned into a theatrical spectacle, with gratuitous violence substituting for actual conflict and a steady stream of f-bombs for gripping dialogue.
The veteran Shannon—a cofounder of A Red Orchid—displays his gift for playing saturnine characters who simmer with a brooding, secretive energy. Knight, too, holds the stage well, his wide smile and boyish presence flickering occasionally into torment and rage. Lawrence Grimm is suitably batty as Birdy, a bearskin-wrapped, tux-clad “civilian” visitor to the bunker who serves little dramatic function, other than to break up the monotony. But with their characters so undefined, so lacking in coherent backstory, the performers can’t find real tension or movement within the scenes. And so their acting tends to get larger and louder, rather than tighter and deeper.
If this play conveys any lesson, it’s that theaters should think twice before allowing playwrights to helm their own work. An outside director could have pointed out the need both to clarify the situation and to pare down the show, which at two-and-a-quarter hours (including intermission) is too long, with a first act that drags painfully and a second act that tosses in complications without tying up loose threads.
There’s been a lot of buzz around “Turret,” which is presumably why the production was moved from Red Orchid’s home on Wells Street to the larger Chopin space in Wicker Park. But at this point, it’s just a star turn, and not a finished or satisfying one. There are some potentially interesting ideas and motifs here, buried in a show that’s more intent on startling and overwhelming the audience than on communicating with it. Performative intensity is a good thing, but it’s not enough to carry a play. We see this clearly in “Turret,” a show with too much heat and not enough light.
A Red Orchid Theatre presents “Turret” at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 West Division. Tickets are $70 and are on sale at aredorchidtheatre.org or by calling (312)943-8722. Through June 22.
