Scott Woldman’s “Beautiful Autistic” plays like a cross between David Mamet’s “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and “Rain Man,” with a dark underbelly ripped out of Neil LaBute. (Er, so to speak.) Now in its world premiere at Chicago Dramatists, Woldman’s story about an autistic young man and his misogynist barfly pal is by turns hilarious and discomfiting, inverting our expectations for the narrative against us with blunt-force trauma.
Jimmy (Nicholas Harazin) is the “beautiful autistic” — a 24-year-old living on disability checks who spends his days in movie theaters and his nights in bars, where he sips diet soda and begins conversations with the young women drawn to his angelic features by telling them about his treatment for testicular cancer. He also knows about tons of other arcane subjects and produces magazine articles from his overstuffed green backpack to share with anyone who will talk to him — which, as you might imagine, isn’t many people.
Eric (Andy Hager), a one-time University of Iowa football hunk turned into the 1990s version of Mamet’s Bernie Litko (or “a cross between Joe Pesci and Jabba the Hutt,” as one would-be conquest describes him), figures out that he can use Jimmy’s good looks to help hook some hotties. But first, he has to get the kid to stop blurting out inappropriate things, though in reality, Eric’s ideas of pickup lines are about as bad as Jimmy’s “I only have one testicle.”
Those inappropriate conversations haunt Jimmy at night; he makes repeated phone calls to his mother, Susan (Wendi Weber), asking her, “Do you think they thought I was weird?” until she literally screams at him.
In a program note, Woldman indicates that, while his story is fiction, he drew upon his own experiences growing up with an autistic brother. Some of the most harrowing but also hilarious-in-their-honesty scenes are flashbacks to Jimmy’s childhood, with overwhelmed Susan dealing with being a single mother to a demanding special-needs child. (Dad, played by Nathaniel Andrew, takes a hike when Susan refuses to institutionalize their son.)
Woldman played off similar alpha-male/nerd tropes like the Eric-Jimmy pairing with some surprising variations in 2013’s “Beaten” at The Artistic Home (which is currently running Woldman’s play “Interrogation”). In “Beautiful Autistic,” though, we don’t learn a whole lot about Eric’s background. Though Hager plays the part with sexist-slob glee, I think some of the twists late in the play would hit even harder if Woldman made Eric a little less of a standard-issue Pickup Artist Wannabe.
Director Rachel Edwards Harvith helps negotiate the shifts in tone from buddy-movie comedy to tender flashbacks with Susan and Jimmy. Harazin commits beautifully to the difficulties inherent in playing a character who wants to connect with others but literally has no idea how to go about it. Woldman does an excellent job tying together past moments in Jimmy’s life with how they’ve affected him in the present. The reveals are smart without feeling too studied.
There are a few too many plot developments that don’t quite pay off — Jimmy’s cancer diagnosis foremost among them. But in its occasional messiness, Woldman finds some pretty touching and tough observations about how little the “normal” people in the world understand the beautiful but difficult minds of the Jimmys who surround us.
Kerry Reid is a freelancer.
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When: Through March 13
Where: Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave.
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $28-$33 at 312-633-0630 or www.chicagodramatists.org