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WINDY CITY TIMES
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Tea with Edie and Fitz
THEATER REVIEW
by Mary Shen Barnidge 2013-05-08
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This article shared 3385 times since Wed May 8, 2013
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Playwright: Adam Pasen. At: Dead Writers Collective at the Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. Tickets: 773-404-7336; www.greenhousetheater.org; $30. Runs through: June 9
Before the curtain rose on the opening performance of Tea With Edie and Fitz, the audience was informed that the play they were about to see was what earned 30-year-old author Adam Pasen his Ph.D.
Viewed in this light, Pasen's non-linear narrative chronologyone character's story moving forward in time and another's backwardcomes as no surprise. Neither do the scripted directions calling for motifs such as silent movies (with title cards) projected onto a stageside screen, comical live-action re-enactments of the aforementioned vintage cinema, blinking wall-sconces signaling apparition activity, a live Pomeranian dog, razzle-dazzle ragtime tunes issuing forth from scratchy gramophones and four fully-detailed locales ranging from hotel rooms in Paris to publishers' offices in Manhattan. Oh, and let's not forget dialogue replete with famous names, weighty quotations, tantalizing gossip of the period and one inexplicably glaring anachronism.
The text justifying all this decoration is ironically lightweight, composed mostly of Hollywood-biopic speculations on intimate conversations between the stars of early American literature, e.g. a squabble where F. Scott Fitzgerald calls his wife a lesbian, and she calls him a faggot, just like his pal, Ernest Hemingway. Later, we hear Edith Wharton declare unswerving loyalty to her mentor, Henry James, after he confesses his homosexuality (speaking from beyond the grave), and we witness Fitzgerald selfishly sabotaging his spouse's artistic aspirations, even as he plagiarizes her lyrical southern speech. We conclude with the fatal tea party bringing together two generations of social rebelsa meeting of minds that Pasen depicts as the confrontation of an imperturbed dowager by a precocious frat-boy. (The ensuing repartee employing the homonymic slang of their respective eras is the highlight of the evening.)
The Dead Writers Theatre Collective manifesto proclaims its members' purpose to be, among other goals, preservation of "the integrity of the writer's original vision." This mission might make for regrettable clutter in translating Pasen's exhaustively researched project from academic hypothesis to physical actualization, but Jim Schneider's direction renders Patti Roeder and Michael D. Graham's Wharton and James as witty and engaging a couple as ever shared passions all the more enduring for being platonic, while Madison Niederhauser and Nora Lise Ulrey's Scott and Zelda convey the tragedy lurking beneath the veneer of jazz-age celebrity. However overstuffed this private-lives-of-the-rich-and-famous fantasy may be rendered by the circumstances surrounding its inspiration, playgoers without advanced degrees will find it readily accessible, nonetheless.
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This article shared 3385 times since Wed May 8, 2013
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