Appreciating Our Gritty Gestalt

THEATER REVIEW

Steep Theatre earns its buzz
90-minute, arresting drama from British playwright Laura Wade
By Chris Jones | TRIBUNE CRITIC
March 3, 2008

Because we all have to die some place, corpses inevitably intrude into everyday life. People encounter dead bodies in bushes, storage units, hotel rooms. But what of the people who make such discoveries? Do their jolting rubs against tangible mortality destroy them? Excite them? Change them for good?

Such disturbing questions are the core of Laura Wade's arresting 90-minute contemporary drama from Britain, "Breathing Corpses," currently in a provocative Chicago premiere at the tiny Steep Theatre. But the 30-year-old Wade, long a staple of the "most promising young playwrights" critics' lists in London, doesn't even leave it there.

She has said she took her title from a line by Sophocles: "When a man has lost all happiness, he's not alive. Call him a breathing corpse." Thus in Wade's 2005 play -- which follows three sets of characters running into dead bodies -- the notion of what constitutes a corpse is most assuredly up for debate.

This is a juicy, tightly packed and exceedingly smart play, and the fast-growing, buzz-heavy Steep Theatre Company had packed its little Sheridan Road storefront to the gills Friday night. If you attend this theater on a Friday or Saturday night, you'll probably have to listen to actors compete with a cover band seeping through the walls from the bar next door. You therefore get an unofficial sound design: For part of Friday's show, it was Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," which had a certain unctuous resonance.

Weirdly, the bleed doesn't kill the experience. On the contrary, it adds to the gritty gestalt and gives the actors more to fight against.

Wade's play demands an intensely visceral production. Director Robin Witt and her cast deliver it intermittently. There are sags in the action, problematic casting, some unnecessary intrusion of fussy realistic details and an occasional deficit of sexual tension where the script wants us to be squirming in our seats.

But when this show is on the boil (as distinct from when it falls to an overly surly simmer), it's hot. The scene between actors Lucy Carapetyan and Jonathan Edwards, who play a couple immersed in heat and violence, sizzles deliciously on that dividing line between normal marital tensions and mutually assured destruction. As a chambermaid obsessed with death, the terrific Julia Siple skillfully navigates a repressed, nervous character who both horrifies us and yet seems as normal as the English provinces she -- and those dead and alive -- inhabit.

Check out the article here.