FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID
at Center Theater
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Adapted by Mabou Mines member Linda Hartinian from Dick’s 1974 novel, a Joseph Campbell Award winner, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said compresses several intriguing Chinese boxes into a story of a man who, as one character puts it, is trying “to become a more involved life form.”
Flow is set in that favorite sci-fi dystopia, a future fascist state: Amerika is carved into police zones (each with forced-labor camps), rebellious students are restricted to a “subsurface” existence, a superefficient 900-number phone grid translates sexual suggestions into instant satisfaction, the age of consent for gay and straight sex has fallen from 13 to 8 (!), and television is truly the Great Tranquilizer.
Lumbered with some energy gaps, Dan Sutherland’s 140-minute staging unravels at a leisurely pace that doesn’t always fit Jason’s Dantesque discoveries. But despite a shoestring budget Prop Thtr’s midwest premiere boasts a paranoid urgency all its own. (Sutherland’s most inspired touch is to surround Jason’s identity search with soporific hit songs from the 50s.) And enough of the novel survives to fill in the low-budget blanks.
But Harris clearly spent less time on the acting. Like the script, it’s weakest in the first act, where awkward blocking, whipped-dog posturings, rushed and flat declamation, and bland recitation fail to keep the plot boiling. The enervation shows up worst in George Scanlan’s Joe Keller; Scanlan doesn’t suggest enough menacing solidity to spark the right resistance from Joe’s disillusioned son. As that son, Gregg H. Palmer offers a strong, unforced portrait of a small-town Hamlet suddenly waking up to discover there are moral cancers that can devour an entire family and leave them looking just the same as before. (Interestingly, Miller was attacking the American family’s unquestioning, zombielike togetherness just as the 50s were trying to enshrine it.)
