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Unwittingly, perhaps, it also exposes the underlying flaw of any number of Chicago’s various theater ensembles. More than once, Custer refers to the members of the ensemble joining together to avoid the “endless heartbreak of auditioning.” In other words, a group of actors who cannot otherwise get jobs join together in order to create their own. This may not be true of all the members, but to assume that it is untrue of any, or indeed many, is naive at best. Custer admits that “in an open casting call, outsiders without the sawdust on their knees will have to not just outperform ensemble members but blow them out of the water to receive a part.” As a young playwright, I’ll admit quite frankly that this philosophy gives me an advanced case of the heebie-jeebies. What it means is that if a play of mine is being cast by a company such as CAE, the best actor for a role will not necessarily get that part. A very good actor who has not hauled enough wood or painted enough flats may very well lose the role to a mediocre actor who is a member of the company. The result of this philosophy is immediately visible in the wide range of the competence of performance in any one production at a theater such as CAE, the Center Theatre, or the Commons, just to name a few that start with “c.” (Nor is an established company, such as Steppenwolf, free from this disorder. I might add that Steppenwolf makes some notoriously bad choices in terms of new play selection–last season’s Bang! for example, or the recent Little Egypt. It seems that no one reads these plays in their entirety–the actors merely read their intended parts, and if they are presented with a sufficient number of good individual moments, the play goes up. But I digress.)
As written, Ghost Watch is a mess; as staged, it was a misproduced mess. Custer tells us that Richard Engling sold a novel to NAL, so he must be doing something right. My response is that novelists are not necessarily playwrights, and as a play Ghost Watch does little right. The end is telegraphed from the first scene–at least for anybody who has ever seen a horror movie–and not in an inexorable, tragic sense, but merely in a predictable one. The play has less to say about possession than it does about what the movies have already said about possession. The characters are dismal one-note creations, forcing actors to fill them with enormous, yet inexplicable energy, as did Bob Pries in this production, or simply play repeatedly upon that one note, as did Nancy Kresin. (To give Ms. Kresin her due, she was stuck with a character which provided her with no dramatic action to play. As written, Alana is little more than a talking reproductive organ with legs, a camera, and no visible motivation.) Custer praises the work of Mary Derbyshire as Jessi. This only makes me grateful that I was fortunate enough not to see the actor she replaced. This actor, according to Custer, provided no reason for the two men to be in love with her. I spent the entire evening in the theater waiting for Ms. Derbyshire to have her head staved in by a member of the cast–any member–and the notion of an actor bringing even less life to this role fills me with pity and fear. Left with a script that offered little new in the way of plot, theme, language, or character, not to mention playable action, Richard Helweg resorted to the reliable method of keeping the actors in motion, hoping that the act of adjusting their eyes would be sufficient to keep the audience awake. For me, the moment of greatest irony occurred during Paul Dillon’s dreadfully jaw-breaking monologue about his dinner with the hawk/werewolf/she-devil executive back home. (Poor Mr. Dillon was saddled with some of the most embarrassing writing of the play, as evidenced by his almost constant pained expression, and this speech was the biggest howler of the evening.) Alana tapes this speech as an audition piece, and throughout I found myself engrossed in trying to make out the image on the video monitor. This, perhaps, is the true message of Ghost Watch: that under the proper circumstances, television can be far more entertaining than theater.
