“Wedding Play”, written and directed by About Face Theatre’s Artistic Director Eric Rosen, is about a playwright who leaves his male lover to marry the pregnant actress who stars in his plays, and about the tragedy that befalls them. Loosely based on “Wedding Song”, by Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, the play contains a lot of “hip” theatrical devices such as a play-within-a-play, actors directly addressing the audience, constant repetition of lines and scenes (a maddening trend in “hot new plays”such as those by wunderkind Noah Haidle, which is about as interesting to me as watching asphalt being laid on the ground over and over again), and actors playing multiple roles, to go with a theatre-insider sensibility. Unfortunately, interesting theatrical devices cannot generally make up for a coherent storyline, involving dramatic conflict, and empathetic characters.
I have always been a big admirer of About Face Theatre, not only because of their mission to be Chicago’s premiere gay and lesbian theatre, but also because they have put on outstanding, and bravely adventurous productions such as their stunning staging of “Take Me Out” (also at Steppenwolf) and their collaboration with Moises Kaufman’s Tectonic Theatre Project on “I Am My Own Wife” (which went on to win both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony for Best Play and Jefferson May’s jaw-dropping one-man performance), and on “One Arm”, Tennessee William’s unproduced screenplay about a, well, one-armed hustler (leave it to the divine Mr. Williams to think that one up). I think Eric Rosen is a theatrical giant, and I give him a lot of props for writing a deeply personal piece about the theatre world which comes across both as a passionate love letter as well as a deeply ambiguous reflection on the future direction of the theatre. But I think the narrative was messy; the conflicts between the playwright and the director, the playwright and his lover, the playwright and his father, the lover and the leading lady, were not engaging enough; and during the performance I attended, the acting was low-energy and lackluster, except for Sean Cooper, who struck just the right notes of insecurity, neurosis, and sympathy as the playwright.
In the October 7 issue of the New York Times, there is a wonderful interview with the great Harold Pinter, where he says that he can never write a happy play, because “Drama is about conflict and general degrees of perturbation, disarray.” I don’t think “Wedding Play” is a happy play, so Eric Rosen must to some extent subscribe to this Pinteresque perspective, but I wished the play had more perturbation and disarray, more chaos and provocation that will lead the audience to reflect and challenge, and less theatrical tricks and wink-wink theatre aficionado references.
To see Chris Jone’s Chicago Tribune review, where he also seems underwhelmed by the play and wishes there were less Charlie Kaufman-like “meta-drama” (ah…uhmmmm…what?) click here.
“Wedding Play” runs at the Steppenwolf Garage till December 2.
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