Playwright: Gary Kirkham. At: Rivendell Theatre, 5779 N. Ridge Ave. Tickets: 773-334-7728; www.rivendelltheatre.org; $28.50. Runs through: April 14
Harold and Elsie are an elderly couple living on a farm in a remote region of Ontario. Harold is a former science professor, his thinking dominated by a fact-based exactitude that the more mystical-minded Elsie pretends not to understand by way of encouraging him to explain himself. Years earlier, we learnshortly after their move away from the university to the countrytheir pre-teen son went missing. Since that event, they have remained in self-imposed isolation, passing the empty time with the affectionate bickering characteristic of long marriages, in anticipation of his return. Then one night, a commercial airliner explodes over their property, scattering detritus that includes a young man strapped into his passenger seatearbuds intact, unscorched, unscarred and very, very dead.
In the search for answers to the problem faced by all playwrights of how to bring the play's characters together and keep them together, a corpse in the room is probably as valid a solution as anyespecially when the derelict clay is posed like a neighbor making a social call (except for the closed eyes). Indeed, Elsie vows to watch over the body until emergency responders arrive, Harold fetching her chairs and other furniture until they have assembled a cozy parlor in their barnyard, where they hold discourse about, and with, the stranger who has, literally, dropped in on them.
Oh, of course the celestial visitor is an angel-analog sent to heal these sorrowful parents' pain and uncertainty, so that they can abandon their exile and move onand if superstar-"sound"inista Victoria DeIorio (who also directs) hadn't been so eager to start the action with an extra-big bang replicating the overhead detonation, we'd be quicker to recognize this. As the story spools out now, we spend too long before warming to Mark Ulrich and Jane Baxter Miller's comfy marital dynamic (Gary Kirkham's dialogue is word-perfect), making their catharsis and denouement appear overly abruptsince we haven't been attending to the hints leading up to reversal.
The primary value of this Rivendell Theatre Ensemble production does not lie in its choice of an obviously workshop-generated script, however, but in its inauguration of a performance space linking the playhouses along Edgewater's East Bryn Mawr Avenue with the burgeoning Rogers Park arts district. Doesn't every recently relocated theater company need adjustment time to realize the extent of possibilities offered by its new home?