Review: Chicago
Free Press
September 27, 2007
By Lawrence Bommer, CFP theater editor
If emotional anatomy were a course, Keith Bunin would be a full professor. Produced last year off-Broadway, this engrossing domestic drama looks at love and loss from as many perspectives as three complex characters can provide. Hannah, an Episcopal minister searching for ultimate truth, employs Brandt, a gay literary assistant, to ghost-write her research on the Gnostic Gospels, supposedly the closest chronicle to the real Jesus. (Bunin knows how to capture the sleuthing thrills of a “Da Vinci Code.”) Hannah also sees Brandt as a match to be made with her 26-year-old son Thomas, now home to search out the truth about his father’s death. Their assisted romance, however, backfires badly because in Hannah’s home, religion fights love for Thomas’ soul. (Interestingly, the stumbling block here is never homosexuality but faith.)
It’s a believable battle with a lot at stake, because as one character says, “The worst thing is not to love someone when you can.” Doubting Thomas, who has given up on religion, suspects that his mother’s interest in his love affair with Brandt is her way, not just to keep him from once again running away from home, but to recruit him for Jesus. God is real to Hannah because of her love for her son.
But Thomas wants no such divided devotion. Brandt, who searches for a stability greater than the sight of his father slowly dying before his eyes, is painfully trapped between a lover and a benefactor. By the end Hannah’s ferocious faith takes its toll on his as well.
Very few plays pack so many truths into three characters. For a young writer Bunin knows everything about the cross-challenges mothers cast on their sons and the ways that lovers find and lose each other. Instead of busy, empty action, we get a wealth of anecdotes as the characters define themselves by the stories they share.
Just as wonderful, Bunin’s effortless emotional accuracy is marvelously captured by Kimberley Senior’s flawlessly cast, powerfully orchestrated Chicago premiere, a Next Theatre triumph to treasure. Peggy Roeder, always one of Chicago’s finest players, fully inhabits Hannah’s passions and peculiarities, her abstract dedication to the ancient mysteries of the Coptic testaments as palpable as her agonizing desire to hold on to wandering Thomas. A bracingly intelligent actor with all the right emotional instincts, Eric Hellman delivers Thomas’ very independent soul with almost exasperating accuracy: His perverse desire to live only in the moment exposes him to hazards we’re helpless to protect him from. Finally, Dennis Grimes’ good-hearted Brandt is as honest a portrayal of a divided heart as a superb playwright could demand.