MELISSA, WHILE SHE SLEEPS
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I can’t remember when I’ve seen a production so at odds with its own intentions. A subscription-season brochure for the Bucktown-based Chicago Cooperative Stage claims of Donald Abramson’s verse play: “It gently reminds us that the precious lives entrusted to our care are ours to cherish, teach and protect but ultimately they belong to those tiny sleeping children.” But the real, unintended theme of Melissa is the way adult society projects its own emotional and cultural baggage onto the unformed personalities of its infants.
Melissa is visited, while she sleeps, by an assortment of real and fantasy figures who will help shape her life: her mother, father, grandparents, and an uncle or two; her attending nurse, teachers, schoolmates; her own husband-to-be and the children they will produce; a “wicked fairy,” a Nordic earth goddess, an astrologer, and the entire Social Security Administration for good measure. These numerous personages are played by a six-person cast under the playwright’s direction; several of the actors are individually quite good, but all suffer from the consistent stiltedness of the poetic monologues Abramson gives them to speak. This is the sort of script in which a father asks, “What can we do more?” instead of “What more can we do?”; a toastmaster refers to “potables” instead of drinks so that he can make a rhyme with “notables”; a person is described as silent “like a sponge that’s swollen full”; and a woman meditating on the miracle of childbirth utters a particularly familiar thought, and then says: “If that is a cliche, well, amen / Sometimes they’re the truest truths.” Sometimes they’re just cliches.
