ALICE & DAVID
Resistance at the Chicago Dramatists Workshop
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The show’s title suggests a relationship play. But Bates devotes surprisingly little time to developing either Alice or David, much less what makes them worthy of our attention. We are told, for example, that David considers himself an artist but never learn what kind of artist or catch him in the act of creation, nor do we ever find out how he’s able to keep Alice in the style to which she is clearly accustomed. (The second scene takes place in the private dining room of an expensive French restaurant.) We learn even less about Alice, and everything we do learn relates to her feelings about David: she respects his whimsy, enjoys his company, misses him when he’s gone. Despite the strenuous efforts of Laura Pruden and Andy Mallinger, these cardboard-cutout characters seem no more real or human by the end of the play than they do at the beginning.
Anyone who caught Bates’s play about the Yugoslavian civil war, Sing for Me, Naxhie, last summer at the Raven Theatre knows that this veteran Chicago playwright–he’s been writing since 1966–knows the medium backward and forward: he can create living, breathing stage characters with the best of them. Clearly Bates is after something different in Alice & David. But what that something might be is never clear. Sometimes it seems he wants to create a sociopolitical allegory a la Steve Tesich in his recent work (Square One, Speed of Darkness). At other times Bates seems more interested in playing pomo onanistic games with the various theatrical techniques at his disposal than in creating a compelling work of art.
THE BOYS NEXT DOOR
Avenue Productions and the On Stage Players at the Avenue Theatre
