Our new show: NO DARKNESS ROUND MY STONE - just recieved a great review from the Chicago Tribune! The biggest paper in the city of Chicago. I am so proud of the show - and I hope you can make it out to see it if youre in the area.
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'Darkness' cast is up to grave challenge
By Kerry Reid | SPECIAL TO THE TRIBUNE
September 12, 2008
The flowers of evil are in bloom again, and such strange flowers they are. Contemporary French playwright Fabrice Melquiot's disquieting and occasionally mesmerizing meditation on death, grief, and grave robbers, "No Darkness Round My Stone," plays in its English-language world premiere with Trap Door Theatre—like a cross between 19th Century symbolist poetry a la Charles Baudelaire and a gritty psychological noir thriller set in the underworld. At least six feet under.
Using disjointed chronology, Melquiot's play, (translated by David Bradby), traces the love affairs of two brothers, swaggering Dan (David Steiger) and sensitive dreamer Ivan (Kevin Lucero Less). When we first see them, they are rifling a recently interred corpse for jewelry and gold teeth. Dan insists on saying a prayer over the woman's body—right before he is apparently shot and killed himself by an outraged bystander.
From this bold and unnerving opening sequence, director Max Truax's louche and lugubrious production takes us into a twilight world of infidelity, necrophilia, voyeurism and cross-dressing. The brothers' father, Louis (Bob Wilson), spends his nights dressed in his dead wife's clothes, prowling for tricks as "Lullaby." Mysterious wannabe poet Juste (Casey Chapman), tries to get over his own broken heart by taking, um, liberties with the dead. Dan's abandoned, pregnant girlfriend Dolores (Tiffany Joy Ross) and Laurie (Cassandra Kaluza), Ivan's feverishly virginal partner, round out the gallery of damaged questing souls.
This is dark stuff, to be sure, and the interwoven story lines occasionally confound comprehension. At times, the connective tissue falls lax as the dialogue turns to poetry devoid of passion. Thankfully, however, the material isn't played for self-conscious shock value. Truax, who most recently brought an intriguing visual sensibility to "Termen Vox Machina," a multimedia piece based on Soviet spy and inventor Leon Theremin at Oracle Productions, makes a good fit with Trap Door's decadent European aesthetic. He also has a fairly good grasp on the more humane aspects of Melquiot's challenging script. Richard Norwood's nightmarish lighting and Ewelina Dobiesz's moldering set mesh beautifully to suggest an end-of-the-world environment where everything the characters want is just out of reach, taunting them in the dreamlike shadows.
Two performances in particular stand out in the mists of Melquiot's tone poem. Ross' betrayed bride-to-be, ripe with bruised pride and unashamed passion, plaintively declares to the faithless Dan "I want each one of my dreams to be a refuge or hospital for you." And as Louis/Lullaby, Bob Wilson is simply marvelous, his sadly comic and understated demeanor imbued with unbearable loss.
Through Oct. 11 at Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland Ave. Tickets are $20 at 773-384-0494 or www.trapdoortheatre.com.
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