HAPGOOD
at Chicago Dramatists Workshop
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The plot concerns the discovery of a mole within the agency who has apparently passed on information to the other side. Could it be Ridley, the cocky agent with the damn-it-to-hell attitude? Could it be the incorrigibly British Blair, the tea-sipping snob no one would ever suspect? Could it be Kerner, the brilliant Soviet scientist who fathered Hapgood’s son? Could it be Hapgood herself? Discovering the mole is further complicated by the appearance of sets of twins, which in effect enables characters to be in two places at one time.
The convoluted worlds of science and of moles and mysterious briefcases would seem the perfect subjects for Stoppard, full of possibilities for wit. But in Center Theater’s production, directed by Mary Zimmerman, Hapgood comes off a lot less fun than it sounds, ultimately becoming needlessly frustrating: the characters seem engulfed in this dizzying vortex of wordplay and plot devices.
Sometimes knock-down-drag-out arguments start from the most trivial of things: pubic hair on a toilet seat or an uncapped toothpaste tube, for instance. “Dream Ridden . . . Bed Bound,” a pair of one-act plays performed by Cactus Theatre at the Chicago Dramatists Workshop, brings us contrasting portraits of this sort of domestic angst.
Good performances in both plays, though. Cactus Theatre creates believable characters and the actors show great skill. Would that they had spent their efforts on a couple of more interesting scripts.
