Our lives, a character notes in Zayd Dohrn’s new play, are marked by a “consuming subconscious hunger for nothing.” A few moments later he clarifies: “Satisfaction is a myth. Desire is endless.”
Spoken by a new age flimflam man, played in terrifically slippery fashion by Mark L. Montgomery, those words are the kind of facile observation that nevertheless rings true, and they are the key to Dohrn’s exploration of self-help, self-control and self-destruction that he has titled, appropriately enough, “Want.”
The play is one of three spotlighted in this year’s Steppenwolf First Look Repertory of New Work, where scripts in the latter stages of development are given a fully realized production at the Steppenwolf Garage (which boasts a new lounge/bar area that is just begging to be turned into permanent post-show hangout). The budgets and ticket prices for these shows are roughly at fringe theater levels, and this year an overall theme of deception is evident in each of the works.
Set in a run-down California beach house (does such a thing really exist in the land of inflated beachfront prices?), “Want” drops in on a small group of former junkies and lost souls who have cut themselves off, cult-style, from the outside world. They are all trying to master — or at least come to grips with — those big, unidentified life cravings that can leave so many of us at loose ends.
Montgomery’s falsely self-effacing character is their informal therapist (despite his protestations), a smooth-talking hypocrite who is one step away from an Ed-Hardy-T-shirt-clad moment of middle-aged vanity. He feels very much rooted in today’s pop culture, as if he had wandered over from an unaired season of “Survivor.” The excoriating, passive-aggressive group therapy sessions that he leads are drenched in a hey-man-no-need-to-get-uptight artificiality. “(We’re) just a bunch of humans talking to each other,” he assures the group.
Dohrn, who teaches writing at Northwestern University (and is the son of 1960s radical Bill Ayers), has a lot of fun with all this self-improvement mumbo jumbo. Directed with a clean sense of purpose by Kimberly Senior, the play makes some sharp, comedic points about the lies we tell ourselves (and the lies we tell the world), and Senior’s cast (including a first-rate Mick Weber as an easygoing former yuppie who swallows his rage, until he doesn’t) feels believably stuck in this rapidly crumbling experiment in group living.
What the play needs at this point is for Dohrn to push things even further. The group has a zero-tolerance policy on secrets, and yet of course secrets are all they truly have. Yet once these are exposed, it has the effect of letting the air out of the tires, and you realize the play as it currently stands is built on false momentum. The last few moments are particularly inert and unclear, leaving far too many confrontations unspoken.
“Oblivion,” from Carly Mensch (who writes for Showtime’s “Weeds”), probably has the most commercial promise of the plays in this year’s First Look. A comedic drama about modern-day teen-rearing and the strains of marriage, it will inevitably bring to mind “God of Carnage,” with its urbane apartment setting and the kind of supposedly open-minded, self-congratulatory parents who — when push comes to shove — are really just full of it.
Mensch focuses on a single “chilled-out” Brooklyn family: a producer of PBS documentaries (Elizabeth Rich); her pot-smoking husband (a spot-on Marc Grapey), who quit his job at a law firm to write pulpy sex novels; and their teenage daughter (Fiona Robert), who has recently embraced Christianity — much to her parents’ horror. There’s also a fellow teen who is a friend from school (Rammel N. Chan) who mostly feels like a tacked-on element.
In narrative terms, the play (directed by Matt Miller) is still finding its footing. Individual scenes suggest the promise of something bigger, or deeper, only to fizzle out. The play is clunky in its treatment of Julie’s newfound interest in God, leveraging it mostly to unmask unaddressed fissures in the marriage.
And though the play nails the language of this liberal subculture — lots of asinine talk of evolved worldviews and irony — this couple, the mother in particular, start to feel like easy targets. Without some kind of outside adult voice to challenge their insular thinking, the proceedings have a claustrophobic dynamic. Grapey’s character and his midlife crisis comprise the most clearly defined aspect of the play, as well as the strongest, and Grapey, longtime veteran of the Chicago theater scene, has a high old time exploiting every opportunity for nuance and comedy at his disposal. It’s a terrific performance.
“Man in Love,” a work-in-progress from Christina Anderson, is set during the Great Depression in an unnamed city where the neighborhoods have evocative nicknames such as The Zoo and The Spread and where deception — significant and otherwise — is the name of the game.
Anderson is rooting around in notions of identity — racial, gender and economic — with a panoramic look at city life. Perhaps too panoramic; the play feels like the victim of attention-deficit disorder, with its diffuse collection of story slices that don’t quite fit into the same pie. (Robert O’Hara’s direction feels just as confused.) And yet any one of the narratives here would work on its own if developed further, whether it’s the young nursing student passing as white, the transgendered neighbor who throws rent parties (parties that, alas, we never see) or the bristly, vibrantly smart loner (intriguingly played by Namir Smallwood) who indulges his psychotic tendencies.
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When: Through Nov. 20
Where: The Steppenwolf Garage, 1624 N. Halsted St.
Running time: “Want”: 1 hour, 15 minutes; “Oblivion”: 2 hours; “Man in Love”: 1 hour, 25 minutes
Tickets: $20 at 312-335-1650 or steppenwolf.org