Playwright: Christopher Shinn
At: Jackalope Theatre at Broadway
Armory Park, 5917 N. Broadway
Tickets: www.jackalopetheatre.org; $20
Runs through: March 28
Christopher Shinn's play had a 1998 London world premiere, with its American premiere a year later in Chicago at About Face Theatre. Seeing it again after 15 years offers perspective on how much things have/haven't changed.
It's Fourth of July in Hartford, Connecticut ( Shinn's birthplace ), and four needy people pair up into somewhat odd couples. June ( Michael Kurowski ), a 16 year-old gay boy, hooks up with Joe ( Robert Howard ), a man of 40 who is married and on the DL. Shinn offers no explanation for the boy's female name. June is relatively inexperienced, scared, insecure and horny but neither transgender nor transvestite. Quite separately, Joe's 16 year-old daughter, Abigayle ( Paige Collins ), leaves her invalid mother at home to join her quasi-boyfriend Dexter ( Danny Martinez ), a slightly older low-level drug dealer and high-school dropout. Eventually both couples have sex, instigated by June and Abigayle, respectively. Joe and Dexter give their partners escape opportunities—Dexter protests that he doesn't have condoms—but nonetheless take advantage of their situations, which seems particularly exploitive in Joe's case. Shinn makes nothing of the fact that June and Abigayle are underage.
What makes Four a little more interesting is that Joe and Abigayle are African-American, well-educated and well-spoken while their partners—respectively white and, perhaps, Latino—represent the underclass. The overly loquacious Joe must work to draw any verbal communication from June beyond the minimal, while Dexter delivers a constant stream of often-amusing trash-talk. However, Shinn's reversal of class/social stereotypes has no specific purpose because that's not what the play is about; it's merely a fact of Four rather than a subject. The same holds true about Joe and Abigayle being father and daughter. It's a fact of the play and nothing more, although it seems like a 900-lb. gorilla that Shinn ignores.
To their credit, Joe and Dexter seem more concerned about June and Abigayle than vice versa, but perhaps that's the self-focused nature of 16-year-olds. Joe, particularly—his DL routine honed to an art form—understands June's feelings of shame and insecurity and delivers an "It gets better" message in his own way.
Four is written in a hypernaturalistic slice-of-life style delivered with believable dexterity by the cast, directed by Nate Silver. Even so, the first 30 or 40 minutes of this 90-minute play seem really sluggish, perhaps because the wanderings of the couples around Hartford are random and unexciting, or perhaps because we know too little about the characters to have any emotional investment. Slowly this changes, especially regarding June ( from my gay perspective ). Four, however, provides no neat ending. The characters have no emotional breakthroughs but go their separate ways seemingly unchanged—their longings unfulfilled and mostly unspoken. It's rather sad, if true.
