AN EVENING OF CHEEVER
To make matters worse, each of the three one-act adaptations in “An Evening of Cheever” ruins his work in a different way. It’s as if the director–Jane E. Dillingham–and the cast wanted to make a point of showing just how many ways there are of getting it wrong.
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The first one-act, The Enormous Radio, based on the short story of the same name, concerns Jim and Irene Wescott, a pair of aspiring middle-class Manhattanites who love nothing so much as listening to classical music on the radio. One day their beloved radio goes on the fritz, and Jim replaces it with an expensive new one. Oddly enough, in a plot turn more reminiscent of Ray Bradbury than of Cheever, the Wescotts’ new radio picks up conversations going on in other apartments in their building.
The other two one-acts fare, sadly, not much better. The Sorrows of Gin is a better adaptation than the first largely because the director decided to lift Cheever’s dialogue word for word, but it still fails to measure up to Cheever’s original. His story is a moody, lyrical meditation on chemical abuse in an upper-class family: Mr. Lawton, clearly an alcoholic himself, keeps firing his household staff for drinking his gin. In the Windy City Theater’s hands, it’s an aimless play that starts out being about Mr. Lawton and the weird way he keeps firing the hired help, and ends up being about Amy Lawton, an oddly untroubled little girl who inexplicably runs away but is caught by the police and taken back home.
