RED CROSS and
The characters of Red Cross and Chicago, two early Sam Shepard efforts, are just so many escape artists, imagining their ways out of confining circumstances. Though Shepard’s early plays teem with overblown speeches that threaten to take his characters over the top, they’re catnip for actors. The players at Kamijo clearly relish these roles, and their rawness confers on Shepard’s sophomoric excesses of the 60s a crude conviction all their own.
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The great strength in Donna Northcott’s staging of Chicago is Circus Szalewski’s bravura acting from inside a bathtub. In Temporary Theater’s The Lennon Play: In His Own Write Szalewski proved he could become a Beatle, but the wily actor comes into his own with this Shepard surrogate named Stu. A fantasy-mongering trickster, Stu plays with a toy boat in his tub as he uses his mouth to talk away every connection he has to the people around him.
At the time, this earthy surrealism must have felt very close to the playwright, but it’s fairly inaccessible to us, so many years later. Still Szalewski, as Mark Nutter did in the mid-70s, brings an intensity and drive to Stu that turn his escapism into pure poetry. Szalewski may underplay the man’s desperate avoidance but he culls Shepard’s images like a gardener.
Mitzi McKay’s staging never rises much above the level of inspired actors’ exercises, but with Shepard’s preference for rhetoric over scene-building this declamation is almost poetic justice. Ted Koch’s Jim shows a solid grounding in the physical quirks of the walking wounded, though he misses the man’s manic need to escape. Joanne Arledge is a bit too level-headed for Carol. Kate Harris plays the impressionable maid.
