Playwright: Michael Perlman . At: Broken Nose Theatre at the Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. Tickets: 773-404-7336; Article Link Here ; $15-$25 . Runs through: Feb. 23
Michael Perlman has written a very smart play, about very smart people, asking very smart questions on a topic too often reduced to simplistic melodrama or hijacked in the service of other, extraneous, agendas. He does it all in 90 minutes, too.
What we learn at the outset is that 15 years earlier, at White Plains High School, a gay student named Mitchell Cole committed suicide—a death that his likewise gay best friend, Dennis Sullivan, believes to have resulted from persistent verbal bullying by classmates. Seeking justice for his fallen comrade, Dennis documents the incident in a film that wins him an academy award. In his acceptance speech, he identifies the ringleader of the long-ago persecution as one Ethan Rice.
If this were classical tragedy, Ethan's offense would affect whole kingdoms, and his self-inflicted punishment entail blood sacrifice, or at least, banishment by the gods. Ah, but even if proliferation of social media on the internet hadn't rendered exile nearly impossible nowadays, this isn't the story that Perlman wants to tell. As Ethan, despite his protestations of ignorance and remorse, finds himself increasingly shunned by his peers, while Dennis continues relentless in his excoriation, we are forced to distinguish between the threat posed by dehumanized ideological conspirators and that of a lone adolescent jerk-turned-thirtysomething loser, as well as to ask ourselves just what degree of retribution would satisfy our thirst for reparation—or revenge.
There's an answer, of course—an untidy and patently inadequate one, but the only solution we can accept after Perlman has steered us through the alternatives. ( Ethan's chum and Dennis' consort also weigh in on the course of their companions' lives as the vendetta escalates. ) Director Spenser Davis never allows the characters—played with quiet dignity by Adam Soule, David Weiss, Ben Burke and John Overton Lewis III—to slip into easy stereotypes, but keeps the emotions always rooted in a fundamental rationality, enabling us to absorb the lessons associated with the pain of adult males gradually forging solitary methods of coping with uneasy memories of youthful transgressions ( and who doesn't have a few of those hidden away? ).
"If we focus on the future, the past won't matter as much," someone says at one point, the magic words being "as much." If moving on can't make everything all right—what can?—it can still be the first step to making it better.
