"Tragedy: a tragedy" ✭✭1/2
"It's the worst world in the world, Frank," a TV reporter gravely informs a news anchor back at the studio in playwright Will Eno's existential comedy "Tragedy: a tragedy," currently in a Chicago premiere from Red Tape Theatre.
Few modern writers are as deft at wordplay as Eno, who stuffs some of the most insanely enjoyable verbal inanities into the mouths of his characters in this satire of hype-fueled, self-important news coverage. Disaster has arrived in this nameless place. The sun has set, possibly to never rise again. Or maybe it's just plain old night and everybody is panicking over nothing.
"Were you struck by anything striking?" a reporter (Steve O'Connell) asks a lone passerby (Paul G. Miller, hilariously unfazed by the drama of the moment). Vapid aphorisms abound: "One look, if we're looking hard enough, says it all," intones the news anchor (Lawrence Garner), apropos of nothing. "I have just gotten word: We don't know anything more yet," confirms the political correspondent (Mike Tepeli).
But Eno — a Pulitzer finalist whose 2010 play "Middletown" comes to the Steppenwolf in June — is just as obsessed with the fears and anxieties that can so frequently occupy our thoughts while lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering why our lives have amounted to so little. As the darkness drags on, the members of the news team — a stentorian anchor and three reporters in the field — slowly begin to lose their grip on reality. They continue to broadcast (the play is essentially a collection of short, highly mannered monologues) as the despair sets in. In the best line of the night, Tepeli's correspondent recalls once receiving a dictionary as a gift and mistaking it "for a long, sad, confusing story of everything."
It works like gangbusters for about the first half of the 70-minute running time, when Eno's one-liners zing by. But the production quite noticeably loses steam as the mood darkens. Director Jeremy Wechsler and his cast are less assured with the material's abstract elements, relying on pregnant pauses that feel like placeholders for ideas that never fully develop. To be fair, this is a script that perhaps oversells its deeper examination of the human soul, and it probably needs a director with more experimental instincts than those of Wechsler, who fails to establish any kind of rhythm in the play's back half.
But it bears mentioning that Red Tape always impressively reconfigures its space. Set designer Emily Guthrie has the audience arranged in domestic tableaux, seated around kitchen tables or on couches and arm chairs, perched on various levels of the space. Wherever one normally watches TV, in other words. It is a clever device that far exceeds the production itself.
Through June 4 at Red Tape Theatre, 621 W. Belmont Ave.; tickets are $25 at redtapetheatre.org
"Roadkill Confidential" ✭✭
Dog & Pony Theatre Company was the first to locally produce the work of Sheila Callaghan, starting with a terrific production of "Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake)" in 2005, which at the time struck me as a dark off-shoot of something Judy Blume might have written.
In the years since, Callaghan (who currently writes for Showtime's "The United States of Tara,") has become a company member with Dog & Pony, which is staging her latest play, about a prickly installation artist (Lucy Carapetyan) who uses dead animals in her work that may or may not be infected with a biological disease. An absurdly overheated FBI man (Sorin Brouwers), worried by this possible terrorism-by-art, has her in his sights.
If only director Devon de Mayo's production — awash with video images and an abstract, almost Kabuki-like sensibility — made a lick of sense. I haven't the first idea what this play is aiming for, nor do I believe de Mayo does, either. Carapetyan's artist comes across as a series of poses and affectations rather than a character worth caring about. Callaghan has a wonderfully smart-aleck sensibility — "I am a block of clay-shaped clay," the fed says — but de Mayo and her cast can't quite string together the various shifts in tone as it veers from sitcom to procedural to whacked-out avant-garde goof.
Through June 4 at The Building Stage, 412 N. Carpenter St.; tickets are $20 at 312-491-1369 or dogandponychicago.org
Twitter @ninametznews