SIDE POCKETS
Chicago Theatre Company
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The owner of the pool hall, Mr. Jenkins (the excellent Cedric Young), is old enough to remember when Johnson won the title back in ’08. It would be hard for him to forget–as a result of that victory Jenkins was so severely beaten by three angry white men that he was bedridden for a week. (Three to one, by the way, are the odds favoring Louis to win.) Jenkins tells his three young patrons, “You all depend too much on these fights.”
They haven’t got much else to depend on. Ray (Victor Wells) wants to be a baseball player; he even played once or twice with the black New York Giants, but in 1938 white teams wouldn’t play black teams. “The only way I’m gettin’ into Yankee Stadium is if I buy a ticket,” he says. And there’s no money to be made playing baseball with the black teams. Convinced that some people are just born lucky and that he’s not one of them, Ray spends his days shooting pool. Stan (Evan Lionel) is a smooth, self-involved cheat who believes in hard though not necessarily honest work. He has a grudging respect for cockroaches: “Anything that can survive that tough must have a place in this world.” Stan believes that his place is playing the trumpet, and if he’ll only hang tough it’ll pay off. Meanwhile he owes Fred (Trent Harrison Smith) $20–the price of one ticket to the Louis-Schmeling fight. Fred is the only one with a job, but he traded in a dream for it. He’s practical, levelheaded, and on his way to losing his soul. By leaning on Stan for the $20 he pushes for a defeat of his spirit, too.
That’s about as endearing as this play, produced by the ETA Creative Arts Foundation, ever gets. Such observations could only be coming from a group of backward slobs sitting in a bar; unfortunately, one of them turns out to be the play’s protagonist. Even more unfortunately, he engages in an ugly sight gag early on: just informed that one of the women who used to hang out in this bar recently died of AIDS, Harvey (Oba William King, who usually has better sense) does a huge take to his groin, mugging unhappiness. Somehow, cheap shtick about AIDS does little to warm me up toward a production, particularly one in which the protagonist refers to women as “chocolate-covered cherries” or “caramels with creamy centers.” Directed by Kemati Janice Porter, it is stunningly offensive to men and women alike.
