WHEN WILL THE RATS COME TO CHEW THROUGH YOUR ANUS?
I won’t detail much of the story, as the play relies on constant surprises and plot twists. Willard (Maher), still as asocial and creepy as in his films, has become a cyborg technician, living in a huge house of his own design programmed to rearrange itself “at whim.” Everything in the house is imbued with artificial intelligence, so that Willard need only say “Lock!” and doors will lock, trapping his stir-crazy and desperately good-natured girlfriend Joan (Harutunian) inside. Also stranded in the house are Lucy (Lisa Black) and Peter (Randy Herman), an inexplicably married couple–she is a frighteningly stoic lunatic monomaniacal in her disgust at “homosexual and lesbian activity,” and he is a rodent exterminator and aspiring poet whose nose was chewed off in his crib by a rat. They were driven out of their own home by demonic creatures who kept attacking them. And Ben (Dorchen, in a raincoat with the hint of a tail sticking out) is now a six-foot rat, lurking undetected in Willard’s mazelike house. He’s bent on terrorizing its inhabitants despite his paradoxical love for Willard.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Finally, though, the play suffers from overdecoration. Much of the tangential action weighs the play down; this three-hour production left me feeling a bit sour and exhausted, as if I had eaten too much of a very rich dessert. Several scenes in the second act are tediously repetitive: the characters have split up and forge their separate ways through the house toward nothing in particular. And the characters of Lucy and Peter, though delightful in and of themselves, don’t seem to fit. Why, for instance, is Lucy so one-dimensionally antigay? Her homophobia seems arbitrary, and it’s not exploited thematically–indeed it seems to disappear late in the show, when she falls in love with Ben, who admittedly has had several boyfriends.
