"ERIC LaRUE" at A Red Orchid Theatre
BY LUCIA MAURO
By choosing to set his non-biased morality play, "Eric LaRue," in a series of four boxed-in locations – from a cramped pastor’s office to a prison holding cell – Chicago playwright Brett Neveu demonstrates the futility of easy compartmentalizing. One of the first writers to take an even-handed and human approach to the timely subject of school shooting sprees, he does not center on the rampage itself. Rather Neveu chooses to explore the impossible healing process through the speckled filter of class differences, religious fanaticism and the sheer angst of being a teenage boy.
This taut drama, receiving its world premiere at A Red Orchid Theatre, has the capacity to make audiences both pay deep attention and fidget uncontrollably in their seats. As with his recent September 11-aftermath work, "Empty," Neveu doesn’t attempt to explain anything away or blame anyone. His "gray area" point of view emerges from what is not said. After all, when one tries to explain mass tragedy, aren’t words the first things that fail us?
Yet bound up in his terse dialogue are all the comfort-zone phrases that most of us seek to reach closure, no matter how false that closure may be. It’s like attending a wake and perpetually hearing things like, "at least he didn’t suffer" or "she’s in heaven now."
In "Eric LaRue," the title character – a teenage boy – is currently serving a prison term for gunning down three classmates (boys who allegedly taunted him). His tormented mother, Janice, tries to make sense of the crime and what could have driven her only son to kill these boys, then come home and watch TV as if nothing happened. This lower-middle class family has obviously been perceived as outsiders in this anonymous middle-class suburb – a fact that comes to the fore when Janice agrees to meet with the mothers of the victims.
This meeting has been arranged by the gratingly self-righteous pastor, Steve Calhan, who believes these women will reach a catharsis if only they open a pathway to dialogue – yet another futile roadblock in society’s efforts to tidy up unanswerable horrors. Religion also frames these people’s lives – even if Janice prefers the Presbyterian faith and her cult-like, automaton husband, Ron, is active in a Lutheran congregation.
As each straightforward scene unfolds – with Janice often being forced to boil inside while she listens to smug people spew their doctrines at her – we witness a tragedy greater than Eric’s shooting spree. His mother, who initially empathized with the victims’ families, is convinced that her son – an outcast – was justified.
When she visits him in prison, Eric speaks of the brutality of life behind bars and shows true remorse for what he did. But Janice, whose spirit and sense of right and wrong have been shot to pieces by all the self-important moralizing around her, lands in an inescapable hell of the mind and soul. She has now been destroyed by bitterness and misunderstanding.
If there is one flaw in Neveu’s deceptively simple structure, it’s that the religious factions – particularly the pastor and Janice’s husband – come across as mealy-mouthed or bloated cartoons. But the playwright’s ability to use carefully crafted words to demonstrate their failure at resolving impossible problems is something of a literary phenomenon. He allows the words to nudge us into those elusive blank spaces – or, more accurately, black voids of human mystery.
Director Ann Filmer’s production is as tight, unadorned and provocative as Neveu’s writing. Kate Buddeke has once again tackled a multitiered, rough-edged role as Janice – a woman whose quest for light or enlightenment has plunged her into the dankest recesses of her soul. Buddeke’s strained non-verbals alone stingingly demonstrate a mother fumbling to understand what’s she’s feeling.
As the psychotically accommodating pastor, Will Clinger is naturally annoying. But his deliberate insistence on healing and searching for channels for constructive dialogue only point to his avoidance of the truth that there are no answers – and often no healing or forgiveness in the real world. His well-meaning oblivion ultimately hardens Janice’s heart.
Other outstanding performances include Claudia Garrison as one of the victim’s outspoken mothers; Jennifer Engstrom as the uncomfortably kind and confused other mom; and 17-year-old Jarrett Sleeper as the achingly believable Eric. Only Doug Vickers – a more extreme counterpart to the pastor – opts for a creepy, brainwashed interpretation as Eric’s father, making his character too easy a target for blame (despite the playwright’s non-judgmental tone).
Heather Graff’s and Rich Peterson’s cramped and sparsely detailed sets, which bleed unevenly from room to room, accentuate the flimsy walls human beings tend to hide behind. Andrew Meyers’ softly celestial lights enhance the characters’ desperate search for peace; and Joseph Fosco’s sound design/original music seeps inside our newly taxed consciences. Jana Stauffer’s subtle contemporary costume choices echo the play’s simmering class struggle.
Neveu’s plays are the theatrical equivalent of that famous photo, often used in college ethics classes, to illustrate our uninformed prejudices. A small portion shows a seemingly terrified woman with a gun to her head. Just as one begins to sympathize with the victim, larger portions of the photo are slowly revealed until we realize that the gunman is a cop and the woman is strangling her child.•
"Eric LaRue" runs through December 22 at A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells. Tickets: $14-$20. Call 312-943-8722 or log onto www.a-red-orchid.com.
