WHISPER INTO MY GOOD EAR
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Two old men sitting alone on a stage. From Waiting for Godot to The Zoo Story to I’m Not Rappaport, this is a situation made for drama. Max and Charlie, however, have rendezvoused on this winter beach for the purpose of committing a joint suicide. At first Charlie would seem to have every reason to pack it all in. His invalid wife of 34 years no longer recognizes him, his eyesight is failing rapidly, and he can’t even work as a sidewalk Santa Claus anymore. He resents everything–the father who used to beat him, the young lovers on the beach too far away for his dim eyes to see clearly, even the tree under which he sits. “It was probably here a hundred years ago, and it’ll probably be here a hundred years from now,” he says. “Why should a lousy tree outlast a man?” He’s a bundle of complaints–until the soft-spoken Max gradually reveals himself to be a man so lonely that he is driven to seek in death what he misses in life, and Charlie finds himself suddenly arguing for the affirmative.
The woman sitting next to me was swabbing at her eyes by the final curtain. This play is probably the first of many warm-fuzzy holiday offerings that will make us misanthropic by mid-December. Whisper Into My Good Ear transcends the genre, however. Once a year it’s all right to cry, especially for an exquisite little gift such as this.
