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player ready...Orson Welles’ 1942 film “The Magnificent Ambersons” charts the decay of a Midwestern dynasty, a tumbling family unable to adapt to social change. The movie is now viewed as a masterpiece but its bleakness perplexed viewers at the time. This newspaper’s notorious, pseudonymous critic Mae Tinée referred to those around her in the movie theater as suffering from a kind of “baffled restlessness.”
That was true of some of the people around me at A Red Orchid Theatre on Saturday afternoon, where Brett Neveu’s new play “The Malignant Ampersands,” billed as a kind of sequel, was unspooling on its premiere weekend replete with a cast featuring the distinguished likes of John Judd, Meighan Gerachis, Travis A. Knight and Steve Schine.
Neveu, regular readers will know, specializes in plays that perplex the audience and many of them have been staged in his creative home, a venerable shoe box that somehow has survived the changes of a Chicago neighborhood that’s a poster child for culturally interesting districts going to pot. Given the lengthy pandemic suspension, being back at A Red Orchid trying to figure out what the heck Neveu was trying to say in a wild play directed, wildly, by the theater artist Dado came with a perverse sense that the world was returning to normal.
So here goes: We’re in that weird demarcation zone where Evanston meets Skokie, somewhere around the optimistically named McCormick Boulevard. Settings include Burger King, Dollar General, Starbucks and the Goodwill, where the early action involves one of the members of the Ampersand family, Gabe (Knight), attempting to acquire a used foosball table and figure out how to get it home.
Knight is trying to get something good going. But alas, most of the Ampersands are dealing with a variety of ailments: hallucinations and conspiracy theories, the onset of physical problems like the loss of both hands, osteosarcoma or other forms of cancer. And they are chased down by something called the Shadow Creature, a scary life-size puppet that most of them can’t see but that makes you think the show intentionally was programmed around Halloween. Certainly, Neveu is clearly saying that this is one haunted house of a Midwestern family.
If you’re walking in cold to the sparse, metaphor-laden place known Neveu-land, you have to know you might well be scratching your head for 90 minutes, notwithstanding a level of commitment here from the actors that ensures some of this material does indeed have an intermittent emotional punch. Whether or not you need to know the Welles film is, for me, an open question. Maybe, maybe not. Likely, it won’t feel like much help.
Neveu is, I think, exploring the idea that the Ambersons (who originally appeared in a 1918 novel by Booth Tarkington) moved to Skevanston, as their ‘hood tends to be known although the characters, frankly, are intentionally nonspecific
The production certainly leans into the craziness of the play. Better, I think, if it had offered more of a rooting counterbalance, although I thought Gerachis, in particular, was riveting to watch.
The Neveu oeuvre, all of which I’ve seen over the years, has many styles and forms, all the product of an immense and complex talent, soon to get wider exposure, given that fellow Red Orchid ensemble member Michael Shannon is set to direct a movie based on Neveu’s “Eric LaRue,” a play about the aftermath of a school shooting.
That’s a very different and far more accessible script, but also reflective of Neveu’s career-long fascination with painful codas.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “The Malignant Ampersands” (2.5 stars)
When: Through Nov. 27
Where: A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells St.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $30-$40 at 312-943-8722 or aredorchidtheatre.org