May 12--Back in the 1970s and 1980s, British radio and television was filled with so-called light entertainment, prime-time quiz shows, wish-fulfillment shows and variety shows with music and comedy. Looking back on that fare now is to recall a more innocent moment on the great media landscape.
With one great stain.
In the last several years, as a shocking number of the hosts and stars of that era -- most notoriously, Jimmy Savile -- have been charged with making sexual advances to minors, or worse. In Savile's case, there was a longtime pattern of child abuse. "Quiz Show," a no-holds-barred play by the emerging Scottish writer Rob Drummond, is clearly intended as a reaction to how that era of betrayal now resides in the memory.
The small Chicago theater known as Strawdog Theatre has snagged the first U.S. production of a play that divided critics when it premiered in Scotland, with some finding the piece heavy-handed and even exploitational, and others arguing that it was an important work that busted open a facade that was built by complicit silence and that deserved to be blown to bits.
Here's what happens in "Quiz Show." In Part1 -- not to be confused with Act1, since there is no intermission and Drummond is using the nomenclature of TV -- the audience becomes a studio audience at what is supposed to be a dead-on reproduction of one of those 1970s shows, replete with the host with the long, thin mic; the eager, regular-folks contestants; the podiums and old-school buzzers. The show is called "False," and the game essentially requires the contestants to determine whether the question they are being asked is a truth or a lie. (You can probably figure out where Drummond is going there.)
But in Part 2, everything collapses, and we start to see that we're not necessarily watching what we thought we were watching, and that the contestants may not be who we think they are, and that, most important of all, the apparent playful innocence of people awarding points, then taking them away is very far from such a blissful state. More of an inescapable nightmare, really. With weapons and victims.
I think "Quiz Show" is a flawed but undeniably gutsy and provocative piece of writing. But this Strawdog production misses the most crucial aspect of the piece, which is that everything in the early section must be believable. If you don't have a quiz show in which you can believe, then you don't have anything solid that can be exploded. And thus the show really doesn't work.
Alas, TV shows re-created on theater stages are often a temptation for parody and overplaying, which is mostly where the director Max Truax seems to want to go in the first part of the night. A couple of the actors try to resist, and, in fairness, this company does not have the budget to re-create a TV studio of the era, as would be ideal. But they didn't need to do that if only they had committed to the real.
When the show and everything about it gets overstated, it also loses power. And thus, when one contestant, Sandra, smashes through the facade, you have no sense of what she has achieved at such cost to herself. I should note that Sandra is played by Sarah Goeden, whose performance is rich, complicated and generally superb in every way and who single-handedly carries the last few minutes, which are the best of the night. Goeden has honest support from Nikki Klix and Paul Fagen and some laughs from Anderson Lawfer, who plays the host. But none of these actors can overcome the lack of veracity in the world around them, which might have been built on lies but was certainly constructed to fool.
"Quiz Show" has been Americanized for this production, a strange choice given that the piece is so clearly a reaction to a series of specific events on the other side of the pond. More problematic, it has lost its period sense. The game show you can watch in Strawdog's upstairs space seems not to belong to any specific moment, but merely to be a generic parody. A lack of specificity and truth has torpedoed many a potentially important piece of theater, and so it goes here. No lie.
Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
REVIEW: Quiz Show by Strawdog Theatre Company
2 STARS
When: Through June 13
Where: Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes
Tickets: $28 at 866-811-4111 or http://www.strawdog.org
