Playwright: Andrew Hinderaker. At: Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave. Tickets: 312-633-0630; www.chicagodramatists.org; $32. Runs through: July 1
Nine years old is too young to draw up a bucket list, but even as a child, John Chapman's aspirations rewarded achievement over potentialconditions demanding clearly defined objectives. We meet our farsighted hero at his 1995 college graduation, his valedictory speech exhorting his classmates to reach for the stars. However, the next daywhen his itinerary dictates that he begin his climb to CEO of Goldman-Sachssomething goes wrong: He oversleeps on the morning of his interview, his business suit is missing and his employers-to-be have not been notified of his appointment. This is because it's 2010, and John is 35 years old.
His shrink calls this disorientation "anniversary reaction." John, in order to maintain focus on his ambitions, has blocked from his consciousness 25 years of occurrences contradicting his projected scheduledelays, failures and departures (his fiancee, for example, now married to somebody else). Therapy is helping him to accept the facts of his experiences, but certain dates, faces or sensory stimuli still trigger flashbacks to pivotal moments that mayor may nothave actually happened.
The progress of our hapless everyman's reintroduction to his own life could have been recounted in a series of comical re-enactments (cf. Groundhog Day), or perhaps as a step-by-step medical procedural, but Andrew Hinderaker instead plunges us straight into the mind of our bewildered protagonist, each new discovery revealed through the intervention of outsiders fully aware of his plight. This mosaic narrative structure requires some acclimation on our part, but the anguish reflected in Nicholas Harazin's portrayal of the would-be crusader reluctantly confronting his best-laid plans gone irreparably awry, his agony affirmed by an adroit supporting cast under the direction of Jonathan Berry, invokes our immediate empathy with a poignancy that never diminishes for an instant.
So where do you turn after leaving it all behind? Hinderaker takes us, literally, to the edge of the precipice (the Van Buren Street bridge, to be specific) before our broken knight's loyal sidekickhimself, no stranger to disappointmentreminds us that the measure of philanthropic contributions is not always scope of achievement. This might sound suspiciously like the proverb about "making lemonade from lemons," but who would deny a generation currently grappling with despair in an uncertain universe (as what generation hasn't?) the ray of hope for a brighter future offered by our author's timely and compassionate resolution.