HELLCAB DOES CHRISTMAS
Famous Door Theatre Company at Jane Addams Center Hull House
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Will Kern’s Hellcab Does Christmas was made for cynics like me. Set on Christmas Eve, this truly funny black comedy describes with unblinking honesty an evening in the life of a poor, beleaguered cabdriver. In a series of blackouts we meet an evening shift’s worth of crazies, assholes, and other annoying, potentially dangerous passengers. In the hands of a lesser playwright this parade of yuppie lawyers and crabby shoppers and drunk out-of-towners would have been just a line of stock comic characters. But Kern, an actor and English teacher turned cabdriver, has such a keen ear for dialogue that all his characters–even the well-dressed woman lawyer and the born-again couple on their way to church, who are dangerously close to stereotypes–are individuals.
It also helps that director Jennifer Markowitz has kept the play clean, simple, and free of acting cliches. As the cabdriver Paul Dillon is a man of a thousand moods–crabby, bemused, pissed off, affected by everything that happens in his cab, but never a sap or a sentimental curmudgeon or a psycho. Half the comedy in this show is in watching the pained expression pass over his face as yet another passenger finds yet another way to offend his dignity.
The play concerns Whitey, the half-mad patriarch of a working-class family so cruel, perverse, selfish, and self-obsessed it makes the Bundys of Married . . . With Children look like the Cleavers. As we meet the members of his family–his screeching, born-again ex-wife, his promiscuous rock-and-roll daughter, his bitchy, effeminate son–we see why he’s so filled with rage.
