ILLEGITIMATE PLAYERS COMEDY REVUE
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“Library” suggests an eerie future in which “readers” plug hand-held metallic orbs into their foreheads, thereby providing themselves with the outlines and condensed themes of the great novels. This scene has overtones of Reader’s Digest meets 1984: the books are stripped of their subplots and “extraneous” details and electronically force-fed into people’s brains (some books are offered in suppository style, a more direct method of gaining and holding knowledge). One reader plugs himself into Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and begins chanting: “Contemplation, alienation, go for drinks.” Meanwhile two others echo him with equally broad, equally twisted themes from Melville’s Moby Dick and David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago.
Most of the Illegitimate Players’ literary targets are readily identifiable, and the players make lots of direct hits. In “Rapwoolf,” however, based on Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the aim seems to be to produce a clever takeoff, not something that’s hysterically funny. This frenetic rap version of Albee’s play about neurotic marriages, featuring Keith Cooper and Maureen Morley, elicited only sporadic laughs on the evening I was there. It may be that this skit is less accessible than most of the others, perhaps because it requires a better knowledge of the target. Still, it shows the Illegitimate Players’ versatility, and with its rapid-fire timing and delivery, it was very skillfully done: the audience applauded at its close.
