'Donuts' a familiar recipe
THEATER | Letts' followup to 'August' is zesty and ambitious but half-baked
Oh, Amerika! (And yes, the invocation of Kafka's early, unfinished novel, which begins as a 16-year-old immigrant boy sails past the Statue of Liberty for the first time, is wholly intentional.)
True, the title of Tracy Letts' new play, "Superior Donuts," which opened this weekend at Steppenwolf Theatre amidst ongoing excitement about his immensely successful Pulitzer and Tony-winning play, "August: Osage County," serves up an admittedly more pedestrian vision. But the essential goal is the same -- to render the American dream in all its tattered contemporary reality, filled with violence, disillusionment and yes, even a shred of hope.
When: Through Aug. 17
Where: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted
Tickets: $20-$68
Phone: (312) 335-1650
Where the play falls short is in its heavy dependence on standard-issue, sitcom-meets-mobster cliches. The whole thing has an undeniable zest, but also feels far from seamless as it lurches from behavioral comedy to urban tragedy to social critique. And its characters -- the young genius undone by his not-so-streetwise escapades, the Maalox-gobbling thug, the female cop with hidden baking skills -- all feel like they've been pressed from pre-existing molds.
The backdrop for Letts' musings is a doughnut shop in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood -- a place that has seen far better days (designer Loy Arcenas' set is ideally timeworn) and is now threatened by Starbucks and the like.
The shop's proprietor, Arthur Przybyszewski (Michael McKean), is the Polish-American son of penniless immigrants who landed in the U.S. a few years after World War II. A child of the 1960s, Arthur fled to Canada to evade the Vietnam War and returned when president Jimmy Carter pardoned the "draft dodgers." Now divorced, and estranged from his daughter, he is an aging hippie -- an essentially decent but broken man with a frizzy pony tail (about which there are some memorable comments), torn jeans, a love of literature and a total lack of dating skills.
When we first meet Arthur, his shop, already on its last legs, has just been vandalized. And his enterprising, similarly middle-age neighbor, Max Tarasov (a comically exuberant Yasen Peyankov), is pressing him to sell the property. Max, a Russian immigrant without a shred of political correctness, is hellbent on opening a big electronics store that (in a purely Lettsian touch) will have a stash of "Croatian porn" to help boost sales, plus the services of his "newcomer" nephew, Kiril (Michael Garvey), a quiet enforcer type.
Enter Franco Wicks (Jon Michael Hill, a young actor of enormous charm and bravura timing). A high-energy 21-year-old African-American who has recently dropped out of Truman College, he is in search of a job. He also just happens to be toting around a gargantuan hand-written manuscript -- his "great American novel," called America Will Be, whose potential-filled title is taken from a Langston Hughes poem -- and has big ideas about how to turn the donut shop into an artists' cafe. More troubling, Franco is being pursued by local mobsters (Robert Maffia and Cliff Chamberlain).
Meanwhile, dropping in for periodic visits are the local beat cops -- Officer James Hailey (James Vincent Meredith), an African-American who participates in "Star Trek" conventions, and his partner, Officer Randy Osteen (Kate Buddeke), whose efforts to get something going with Arthur tend to go nowhere. A sage, semi-homeless woman, Lady Boyle (Jane Alderman), is the shop's sole customer.
Letts is a writer who rarely repeats himself, though "Superior Donuts," directed by Tina Landau, contains many of his trademarks: a sharply funny offhandedness; a playful social commentary rooted in stereotype, but heightened by a certain mix of braininess and raw earthiness; a slightly off-kilter realism; and a turn-on-a-dime ability to switch moods.
And Arthur, one of Letts' most intriguing, deftly drawn characters -- gentle but full of suppressed rage -- is given a marvelously natural and believable performance by McKean. (After an initially jarring launch, the actor even manages to make the series of soliloquies Letts has given him feel wholly organic.)
There's unintentional irony here, too. These days, even Starbucks is having a tough time.