HOLD STILL It's family time. |
This week, many of us will sit down to turkey, stuffing, and a variety of mashed root vegetables. If you expect your own Thanksgiving to also include a helping of familial anxiety, rest assured that you have nothing on the relatives gathered in Bruce Norris's very black comedy, The Pain and the Itch. In Norris's virulent, scathing satire of the liberal American privileged class, holiday conversation touches on pedophilia, abuse-envy, and gang rape — as well as the merits of golf, Bill Moyers, and "distressed" home furnishings. The Pain, which premiered at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 2005, receives a terrifically taut and edgy production by Rolling Die Productions, under the excellent direction of Todd Hunter. Highly recommended, though not for the faint-of-heart, it's quite a shake-up of the holiday on which normally, in one character's definition, "we all eat of the same bird, which then makes us feel sleepy."
But few are dozing off in this tasteful, expensively furnished, and comically tense household (the attractive set — dark wood and leather, muted wine and slate blue, oriental rugs — is the design of Aaron Hutto). For the day of thanks, precariously married Clay (Andrew Fling), Kelly (Whitney Smith last weekend; Joi Smith November 28-30) and their mute, strange young daughter Kayla (Alana Thyng), host and do battle with Clay's more-tolerant-than-thou mother Carol (Carol Davenport), his obscene brother/rival Cash (Matthew Schofield), and Cash's young, purple-leopard-print-clad Russian girlfriend, Kalina (Elizabeth Krane).
As the big meal approaches, Kalina chases around a screeching Kayla, who compulsively scratches herself and steals knives off the table. Cash talks bathroom talk, skewers his family's white/rich guilt, and repeats rumors about the maid. Carol gushes over NPR and her tolerance for porn. And Kelly viciously snipes at the emasculated Clay, who is too wussy to do anything about the mysterious creature that's apparently gotten into their house. Throughout all this, family members periodically sit down and converse with a Arab stranger named Mr. Hadid (Chris Walters), who, with increasing bewilderment, observes the holiday's downward spiral.
It proceeds at a very brisk clip: The Mamet-esque dialogue encompasses a non-stop stream of calamities and ill-will, and Hunter's direction, throughout, is virtuoso. He expertly shifts the focus of action about the stage, at breakneck speeds but always controlled, from one absurd outrage to the next. It takes a tight cast to keep up this sort of pace, and Hunter's is stupendous — quick, nimble, and devastatingly funny. Davenport's blithe Carol, in a Christmas cardigan, has pitch-perfect first-grade teacher inflection, and thus is insufferable. Schofield is a delicious sleaze with his porn-star facial hair, evil and well-used eyebrows, and impish delivery; his paramour Kalina is, in Krane's hands, a lovely, exuberant mix of innocence and profanity. As Kayla, Thyng is perhaps a touch old for the part, and some of her more overt reactions (such as perking up when anyone mentions death) come off as slightly heavy-handed. Still, her savage and ethereal strangeness is genuinely creepy, and it plays well against the rest of the jabbering clan.
