With all my theatergoing, inevitably, I will come across that play, where, because of the sheer lack of anything interesting going onstage, my mind wanders to more adrenalin-pumping thoughts (such as the latest hypnotically vulgar episode of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List-her videotaped public pap smear, anyone?- or the flood of wacky #shakespalin quotes on Twitter). Joel Drake Johnson’s new play, A Guide For The Perplexed, now in a world premiere production at Victory Gardens Theater, is one such play. The show’s marketing trumpets Kevin Anderson’s return to the theater he received his Actor’s Equity card from, a very similar angle to the one used for William Peterson’s headlining of Blackbird last summer, but Perplexed is not at all comparable to David Harrower’s masterful work – it is underdeveloped, inconsistently written, at times dispirited, and frankly, unengaging, despite a trio of powerful male performances. A Guide for the Perplexed is an apt title for the audience experience – who thought that this play would be interesting enough for a paying audience to watch?
Anderson plays Doug, newly-released from prison and coming to stay in his elder sister Sheila (Meg Thalken)’s affluent Glencoe household. She’s away on business so he spends his time with her prissy, delusional, OCD husband Philip (a really excellent performance from Francis Guinan), fired from his job due to suspicion of white collar theft, and her depressed, bullied, gay genius teenage son, Andrew (a convincing Bubba Weiler), who hates both his parents and wants to kill himself. Doug has enough problems of his own – he is prone to violent outbursts, he hasn’t been able to sleep for the past five years, he is stalked by a woman (Cynthia Baker) who wrote him letters while he was in prison, he doesn’t know how to re-start his life after incarceration. He doesn’t want to be the one “saving” these two dudes from their demons, but in the couple of days they spend together, he helps them find the beginnings of redemption. Yawn. The premise just feels so much like a “Lifetime for Bros” TV movie, littered with narrative and character potholes as big as the ones on Touhy Avenue. Why is Doug inconsistently portrayed – sometimes he is mean and obnoxious, sometimes he is agreeable and tender, sometimes he is so full of joie de vivre (the whole Rolling Stones sing-along) that it feels like he has never been in prison? It’s great to have a complex, multi-dimensional character, but his motivations, what makes him tick, should be clearly depicted as well. We never know exactly why Doug is angry, why he tried to kill himself in prison, why he tried to kill someone which sent him to prison in the first place, why he feels so alienated from his family (there are hints about lack of familial love and understanding but Johnson never fully develops them). With the murkiness of Doug’s character and his relationship with Andrew, the play’s ending feels contrived and unconvincing. I think Anderson turns in a heroic job, able to capture the intensity of Doug’s emotions when needed, and displaying that sexy-edgy spark that made him the next-big-Hollywood-thing in the 1990s after Sleeping with the Enemy and the TV series Nothing Sacred, but I don’t really think Johnson gives him enough to work with here.
Weiler and, especially, Guinan also turn in brilliantly realized performances despite the shortcomings of the script. Weiler has the brittleness of someone who thinks he is too smart and too good for the rest of the world, but he also has the achy loneliness and terror of a teenager who doesn’t yet know his place in that world, and who doesn’t have the emotional support (from parents or mentors) to figure it out. It’s an arresting, impressive performance. It’s particularly impressive since we don’t really get to see why Andrew doesn’t feel that support. OK, Philip runs a very structured, rule-oriented household but is that enough to kill yourself over? Maybe Johnson should have had Andrew work as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda to give the character a sense of perspective. Also when Andrew says his mom Sheila is a sadist, the audience is truly perplexed since the only time we see her with him, she’s mellow, understanding, almost groveling. Whaat?! The whole conflict between Philip and Andrew over the feeding of the tropical fish feels dramatically innocuous and actually quite unrealistic to me. Fortunately, once again, Guinan is a pleasure to watch. He captures Philip’s emotional rollercoaster beautifully – terrifying but frustrated when he explodes at Andrew over the dead fish, heartbreaking when he asks Sheila for a divorce, heartwarming when he helps Doug with his tie. Unfortunately, we never get to truly know Philip – why is his marriage with Sheila on the rocks (is it just because of the alleged white collar crime or are there other issues?), or why is he really hard on the rules with Andrew (is it his OCD nature, bad parenting, or something more profound, like an attempt to make sure his son doesn’t turn out to be a white collar crook in a bad marriage like him? Unfortunately, Johnson doesn’t help us much).
The female characters are not fully-fleshed out and seem to serve only as props for the narrative and the male characters to move forward, so kudos to both Baker and Thalken for giving them the good old college try (the unfortunate Thalken has to play all her scenes talking on her cell phone, shoved to the ends of the stage, since Sheila is supposed to be away). Sandy Shinner’s direction is so unobtrusive that it almost feels invisible. Jeffrey Bauer’s set design is terrific in capturing the feel of an affluent suburbia, but the whole rotating stage to denote scene changes is a little too 1980s for me. With the technology and resources available to a major regional theater such as Victory Gardens, there could have been more inspired and innovative approaches to use (Exhibit A: Todd Rosenthal’s work at A Parallelogram). On second thought, inspired and innovative probably isn’t what the script was looking for.
A Guide For The Perplexed is at Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave., until August 15.
Tags: Victory Gardens Theater
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