March 11--A gruesome crime occurs offstage in this tense 1997 drama from Northern Irish playwright Gary Mitchell. A teenage girl is raped after a party one night and left for dead, a shocking turn of events that isn't about her at all but the men who were in her orbit at the time. Namely, two brothers: Richard and Ray.
Richard has a developmental disability, one that is significant enough to rule out living on his own. But he has very specific ideas about his independence, and it primarily involves retaining the status quo at home where he lives with his dying (and unseen) mother and Ray, a bully and a layabout who nonetheless is tender with his brother and refuses to treat him as a simple-minded child. This is Ray's one redeeming feature but it also leads to his downfall.
There's a third brother in the mix as well. That's Gordon, who is getting married and would like Richard to come live with him in a more structured environment than the one Ray has contrived in that festering home in North Belfast. Even the occasional presence of Gordon's fiancee can't puncture the bubble of testosterone-fueled hot-headedness contained herein (the wonderfully, deceptively cozy set is from Merje Veski).
Set against a backdrop of still simmering tensions in Northern Ireland, there is a long bit of expositional dialogue at the start that is meant, I think, to lay out some of the conflicts happening outside the home. The narrative engine sputters at bit at first, at least in this production from director Jeri Frederickson for Irish Theatre of Chicago, but once the energy is focused squarely on the dynamic in the home, the play takes off thanks to the deeply messed up interplay between Matthew Isler's Ray, Gage Wallace's Richard and Jeff Duhigg's Gordon.
"But still, you have to think about her," goes a line of dialogue about the poor girl in question. "No, I don't," comes the reply and that tells you everything you need to know about this very male-centric look at a family unraveling before its eyes.
Review: 'In a Little World of Our Own' by Irish Theatre of Chicago
2.5 STARS
Through April 10 at The Den Theatre, 1333 N. Milwaukee Ave.; tickets are $26-30 at irishtheatreofchicago.org
