KVETCH
It could be the stuff of made-for-TV melodrama (“Get me Marlo Thomas and Martin Sheen”). But in playwright Steven Berkoff’s inventive and eccentric mind it’s much more, and much better. Berkoff’s Kvetch, receiving a splendidly played Chicago premiere by the Blueprint Theatre Group, is a dark expressionist comedy about the internal conversations of its protagonists. Though the situation of its characters may not be shared by everyone in the audience, no viewer can fail to recognize the psychological patterns of insistent self-criticism that Berkoff so amusingly and instructively dramatizes.
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Berkoff’s basic stage technique is simple, an improvisational-theater game called “give and take.” In the middle of a conversation between two or more characters one character suddenly shifts into another mode and speaks his or her inner thoughts, while the others onstage freeze in the middle of whatever they’re doing. Very funny on a sight-gag level, this game is also an enlightening exercise in subtext, with the actor expressing the currents of feeling that run under his lines. Played with split-second precision by the five-person cast under Keith G. Miller’s keen direction, Kvetch has both the spontaneous feel of good improv and the comic crackle of a well-honed play.
