Centerstage - Chicago's Original City Guide

Articles Sections >> Arts + Words Bars + Clubs Dating Festivals Fitness Food Lifestyle Music Theater Travel + Tourism Who's Who > View All Theater Guides

Kudos to playwright Mark Ravenhill for capitalizing on an utterly formulaic genre.

Saturday May 05, 2001.     By Temple Lentz

Theater Feed

Bailiwick, 1229 W. Belmont
Thurs-Sat 7:30pm, Sun 2:30pm
Tickets: 773/883-1090. $20-25
through 10/11

London. Man harasses girl who lives with boy who loves boy who covets jailbait. Throw in some drugs, a few foul words, a shabby apartment, and some graphic sex, and you've got yourself a blockbuster. Kudos to playwright Mark Ravenhill for capitalizing on an utterly formulaic genre that should have died a painful death at least a decade ago. Unfortunately, Ravenhill hasn't managed to breathe anything even remotely resembling new life into this stale idea of valuable theater. Shopping and Fucking glamorizes a pitifully standard idea of "gritty urban reality," reveling in its perceived edginess without even venturing near the edge.

Bailiwick's publicity conundrum a few weeks ago illustrates the entire story: Some of the puritans living and working near the theater teamed up with a handful of drive-by moralizers to raise a stink over the title's appearance in full on the marquee. Seems a silly debate, since even if the words are supplemented with ellipses or stars, the innocent masses are still well aware of the word in question.

But so what? Thos upstanding citizens should have known better than to cause a titular tiff. Bailiwick has earned incredible free publicity, and now can line its pockets with dollars paid by intrigued GenXers from every suburban corner. And good for them. Lemons are best when squeezed into lemonade. One hopes, though, that they will not be misled into the belief that Shopping and Fucking is a work of inspired, cutting-edge art.

In Shopping, Lulu (Meredith Zinner) lives with Robbie (Joseph Foust) and Mark (Michael Szeles). Lulu and Robbie are something more than roommates, and Robbie's been dating Mark for quite some time. But when Mark decides to kick his smack habit and enroll himself in rehab, everything falls apart.

After a few seconds of despondency, Lulu and Robbie decide to pull themselves together and join the working class. Robbie manages a day of flipping burgers. Lulu recites Chekhov topless, in hopes of landing a job with a home shopping network. What she gets instead is a gig dealing Ecstasy for a sentimental ball-buster (Jeff Ginsburg). Trying to help her out, Robbbie bungles the job. The two scramble for cash to pay The Man, and discover their callings in phone sex.

Meanwhile, Mark's decided that any meaningful relationship constitutes codependency. He pursues meaningless sex in hopes of breaking his addictive personality, but ends up falling for a 14-year-old hustler whose abusive pasts makes him want it rough or not at all (Danny Belrose). Through it all, Ravenhill weaves a thin narrative of the title's components, boiling life down to its two principal capitalist and carnal elements.

Despite the play's potential appeal to those of us who weaned on the spectacle of "gritty reality," Ravenhill fails to deliver. His characters are shallow cartoons that make trite observations about the dirty, greedy world around them.

Even so, the audiences are bound to flock to see this urban miasma on stage, hoping for even a little spicy titillation. It's hip to think these shallow representations actually mean something, and it's easy to see why Bailiwick chose the play. After all, it opened in London in 1996 and is still playing. There's a definite market for this kind of slop.

Thankfully, Bailiwick pulls out all the stops in its effort to pull off this potentially disastrous show. Although far too many of the production's elements are as stereotypical as the play itself, they're executed as honestly as possible. Bailiwick's production is rife with pulsing techno, flashing lights, and kitschy punky costumes - - just as one would expect. While they don't add anything to the play's monotonous narrative, the artists have done a fine job of distracting from it.

A strong cast, directed by Jeremy B. Cohen, shores up the show's weaknesses and almost manages to create believable, interesting characters from the nearly blank page which Ravenhill has given them. The company bleeds every possible drop of life from Ravenhill's weak lines and forces those drops to resonate from every corner of Dan Ostling's beautifully squalid set.

Given such a strong production, it's a shame they didn't have better material to work with.