UNIDENTIFIED HUMAN REMAINS AND THE TRUE NATURE OF LOVE
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Quite a lot of body, actually. Human Remains is all about bodies, one way or another. Fraser and his director, Derek Goldby, have installed a big bed center stage at the Halsted Theatre Centre and plopped a succession of attractively naked people down on it, giving them no end of sexy–if only simulated–activities to perform with each other. There’s lesbian this, gay that, heterosexual other things, along with a nasty little taste of dramatically significant bondage. When nobody’s making active use of the mattress, a psychically gifted whore named Benita lolls on it, recounting classic urban folklore in the form of mad killer horror stories–like the one about the baby-sitter who gets threatening phone calls that turn out to be coming from another part of the very house at which she’s sitting.
This Playboy-meets-Freddy Krueger aspect of Human Remains is pretty amusing, all in all. I like looking at naked people and I like hearing a good, goose-pimply campfire tale. Fraser and Goldby are more than generous with both. And that being so, I probably shouldn’t mind their attempt to give the experience a socially significant gloss. In fact, I should welcome it: As every rape case and gay bashing proves, there’s a wide and dangerous ground on which sex and violence collide in ways that promise something a good deal worse than just a creepy shiver. A play that could bring me up short, effectively projecting the true horror in the fun–that would be a play worth seeing.
Fraser’s script is so thin and slick and full of arty technique that you get the feeling it wants to be a movie. It would probably succeed as one, too, in the sex-is-scary mode of Fatal Attraction. Onstage, however, it suggests the same emptiness it thinks it’s attacking.
