July 2010 Theatre Review by Lawrence Bommer
A Parralelogram
What if we knew everything that was going to happen to us, yet couldn’t do anything to stop it? Is free will just an illusion fostered by our ignorance of the future? Are our lives on a time loop in which we can leap around and make strategic alterations? Is innocence—the freedom from guilt over things we can’t prevent—really just the result of not knowing what’s next? These admittedly fascinating questions are more absorbing than the action, such as it isn’t, in Bruce Norris’ latest puzzle play at Steppenwolf.
Combining (and exploiting) the best elements of “Groundhog Day” and “The Butterfly Effect,” this fast and flippant drama centers on Bee. She’s Norris’ casebook study in the very un-absolute relativity of hopes and fears. Living in a trendy ground-floor condo and mostly confined to her bed, this young woman cohabits with a boyfriend Jay who’s estranged from his unseen wife Marcie and kid. It’s enough for this stereotypically regular guy to watch football games as a distraction from death. The remaining normal character is the lawnboy JJ who will inevitably factor into Bee’s future.
The abnormal one is Bee 2, a possible figment of Bee’s imagination who nonetheless can foretell events. She does it by means of a magic parallelogram that functions as a remote control allowing Bee to “do over” selected scenes from her ongoing life. It seems that this busy Bee has access to information coming from all the parallel universes that intersect with what we witlessly call the present and allow for a bracing simultaneity of past, present and future. It gives her a detachment that’s as creepy as the Grim Reaper’s hoodie.
Unfortunately,
whatever paltry changes the real Bee makes in the details of her
“rewound” moments can’t really affect the inevitable
outcome as predicted by Bee 2. That, alas, reduces Bee to a
present-day Cassandra: Her references to coming events make no sense
to the temporal creatures around her. Even worse is her
interaction with this unseen “futures” consultant (who
warns her about a coming epidemic spread by tropical birds).
Bee’s outbursts seem crazy or crafty or both.
In subsequent scenes we glimpse Bee’s future in a hospital room where she seems to have ventricular cancer (but nothing comes of it) and years later, where, now shacked up with a lazy JJ, she lives in poverty with occasional visits from Jay who’s now uneasily reunited with Marcie. Of course, given this play’s gimmick of a time-traveling version of Clarence the angel, Bee is visited by Bee 3 and 4. These emanations assume different forms whose unseen communications with Bee creates all kinds of outrageously predictable comic confusion. You’ve seen it all before in “Harvey” and “Blithe Spirit.”
By the end Bee has learned a perfectly unremarkable lesson—So what if you can’t prevent the worst from happening? You can still be nice to people even if you don’t mean it. That unedifying and smug conclusion perfectly fits a playful but deeply cynical drama that plays too much like an illustrated college bull session: “Hey man, what would happen if we all knew just how stupid and pointless everything we did would be until we croak? Pass the bong already...”
Anna Shapiro’s staging works fairly well to keep the cuteness in check. But there’s an unavoidable hip complacency to the playwright’s presumed omniscience (and lack of compassion) for these fallible mortals who are too stupid, it seems, to know what comes next. You see it most in Mary Louise Burke’s deadpan, chain-smoking Bees 2, 3, 4, all low-key oracles whose no-nonsense descriptions of the awful fates that await these characters are as dispassionate as a stock tip and just as moving.
Despite a role built almost entirely of reactions to Bee’s revelations and the skepticism of those around her, Kate Arrington makes Bee as fully fleshed as this guinea-pig anti-heroine can be. Tom Irwin’s Jay is equally efficient at displaying his bewilderment at his lover’s supposed flights of fancy into the future. Tim Bickel has the thanklessly ethnic role of feckless JJ, a guy whose expectations for the future end with his next beer.
Three hours after you see this, the tricks will wear off and you’ll be left only with the two hour drama’s thuddingly obvious and mean-spirited point: Whatever happens, we have to get on with our lives and hope for the—well, if not the best—then the not too tragic. What can’t be cured must be endured. Get over it. Suck it up. Get used to it. Man up. I’m sorry but I hate this particular pseudo-philosophy--and it’s hard to love a play that peddles it like a placebo. Steppenwolf Theatre presents "A Parallelogram," a new play by Bruce Norris through August 29, 2010. For more information on this show, please visit the Theatre In Chicago A Parrallelogram page.
About Lawrence Bommer
A
native Chicagoan, Lawrence Bommer has been an active free-lance
writer and playwright since 1975. For twenty years he wrote a
weekly column, "Opening Nights" for the Friday section of
the Chicago Tribune, where he also regularly contributed theater
criticism and feature writing. His work has appeared in
Stagebill, the Pulitzer-Lerner newspapers and The Advocate.
Mr. Bommer was theater editor for the Windy City Times since its founding until 1999; from 1986 a theater critic for the Chicago Reader (where he has also written for the "Calendar" and "Our Town" sections); Chicago Free Press, where he was contributing editor until the paper’s demise in spring 2010; Chicago Footlights, where he has been a regular contributor; and Plays International, where he is the Chicago correspondent. He has also contributed to the Hollywood Reporter, PerformInk, Screen Magazine, CitySearch, the Chicago Illini, Inside Chicago, Illinois Entertainer, the International Theatre Festival of Chicago newsletter, Plays International, CitySearch, Playbill Online, TheatreMania, CurtainUp.com and Chicago Enterprise. Mr. Bommer is a three-time finalist for a Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism in the "arts criticism" category. In 1991 he became a regular theater and, dance critic and arts writer for the Chicago Tribune. His commentary has also aired on LesBiGay Radio, WGN and on Milwaukee Public Radio.
As a playwright, Mr. Bommer's work has been produced in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Madison and, in Chicago, by the Organic Theater Company (Jonathan Wild [1979], Poe [1980]. Gulliver's Last Travels [1993] and by Lionheart Gay Theatre (Gunsel, The Tyrannicides, Killers and Comrades). Since 1976 Mr. Bommer has taught at the Francis W. Parker School and was a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1969 to 1975 (where he received his Master's degree in English), as well as a guest lecturer at the College of DuPage, Roosevelt University, DePaul University and the University of Chicago. Mr. Bommer is a member of the American Theater Critics Association and has been a member of the National Writers Union and the Dramatists Guild.