Tuesday, September 9, 2008

More praise


This review taken from Time Out Chicago:

BRIDE, HEAD REVISITED Trap's cast enjoys the wedding suite.

This drama by young French playwright Melquiot provides what some might consider the stereotypical Parisian theatrical experience: There's lots of bizarre behavior accompanied by ironic musings on the emptiness of human existence, delivered by pitiful lowlifes wearing ghoulish makeup and staring off into the middle distance. Look closer, though, and you'll notice that Melquiot uses these elements to mask what's essentially a very conventional play.

On the surface, the main themes are those old chestnuts, loneliness and mortality. Brothers Dan and Ivan are grave robbers who encounter trouble on a job one night that leaves one or both of them (it's not entirely clear) dead. This occasions the introduction of other (apparently also dead) members of the family: Dan's pregnant, jilted bride-to-be, still wearing her tattered wedding gown; Ivan's effusive but unfaithful girlfriend; and the men's desperately unhappy father, who leads a double life as a transvestite prostitute named Lullaby. Melquiot's sensibility is cheerfully macabre, his writing style quasi-absurdist with a dash of the lyrical. And yet, crazy characters and borrowed style aside, the plot mechanics are pure melodrama (the climax, for instance, depends on a love triangle and gunshots), gussied up with the occasional flight of fancy or fatuous pronouncement ("God is dead, but I'm not").

Truax's production endows the play with both verve and gravity. Kevin Lucero Less and Cassandra Kaluza give Ivan and his girlfriend a nice, loopy innocence, but only Bob Wilson, as the tortured tranny, truly taps into his character's mad desperation.

**** - RECOMMENDED!

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