Jan. 15--The last major new work from Dan LeFranc that was cooked up in Chicago, "The Big Meal," was a gorgeous, heart-wrenching drama and one of the best plays to premiere here in recent years. But if "The Big Meal" was a banquet of truth, LeFranc's halting latest, "Bruise Easy," also premiering at the American Theater Company, needs a lot more surgery, and a consistent style.
Conceptually, the piece is very interesting. It's conceived as a modern Greek tragedy with the tonal qualities of Euripides.
Here, the mighty orchestra of those ancient theaters is rendered (the design, by Chelsea Warren, is superb) as a flat expanse of driveway concrete, the infertile ground of an Orange County subdivision where once there was an ocean view, before they built a freeway. The giant door within the "skene" that dominates most classical drama is, in LeFranc's conception, a roll-up double-garage door, just as dominant as ancient palaces in the landscape of the 'burbs, and the psyches of the youth of the O.C. The chorus is made up of kids from the neighborhood, to whom nobody really listens.
We're in the land of familial tragedy, we have a brother and a sister, locked in a blend of anger and inappropriate intimacy. They're like millennial descendants of Electra and Orestes. And they both are looking for their absent mother. Tess (Kelly O'Sullivan) has returned home -- pregnant, she says -- after a failed relationship (or three). She finds her slacker man-child brother, Alec (Matt Farabee) sitting in front of the garage, where he seems to live, doing not much of anything beyond messing with some random electronic device -- recording his own boredom.
These are the grown(ish) kids of divorce. Tess, we come to see, left long ago with dad. Alec stayed home with the woman who dominates conversation but cannot be found: Has she left? Is she dead? Did she ever really exist? And thus Tess and Alec mostly just have each other, meaning they chat, roll around and spar, sometimes like characters in an Annie Baker play, sometimes like the semi-siblings of Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love."
O'Sullivan and Farabee are strongly defined actors and "Bruise Easy" (don't we all?) has its share of intense moments. Plenty of driveway heat is generated by these two actors. LeFranc, moreover, is a very skilled writer who knows how to slash your jugular vein when the fancy strikes him, and he gets in some slashes, all right.
"Bruise Easy" is not the first drama about the soul-sucking nature of the suburban broken home, of course, but it takes far more risks than most and it elevates the angst of middle-class America. LeFranc clearly wants to show how the combination of abandonment, boredom and cultural deprivation bruises a young person's body and soul in equal measure. It's a play that really could be something.
But it ain't even remotely there yet.
Part of the issue is that LeFranc and the director, Joanie Schultz, have to decide whether they want this affair to be an overripe satire or a story in which we can emotionally invest. The various scenes between brother and sister are interrupted by a faux-chorus that Schultz has staged as a parody of every bad Greek chorus -- this is funny for about 10 seconds but becomes tiresome and robs the chorus of dramatic and emotional impact. They need to be real. Or go away.
Elsewhere, the production veers between sweaty (and underpaced) intensity on the driveway and little interludes of pop music, sending the style of the show cascading in multiple directions and robbing it of a rich center around which you can wrap your arms.
There is a real play here -- and if you like edgy material still in development, I doubt you will regret 85 minutes in the company of O'Sullivan's Tess and Farabee's Alec and a writer who -- to his great credit -- never forgets what his audience is feeling and constantly reaches to touch their hearts.
That is LeFranc, as I've experienced him. And there are moments when "Bruise Easy" really does achieve a purple intensity, both burrowing below the surface and showing its colors in the open. But this show still needs drive, force and the propelling engine of truth, driving us all somewhere.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
"Bruise Easy" -- 2.5 stars
When: Through Feb. 14
Where: American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron St.
Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes
Tickets: $43-$48 at 773-409-4125 or www.atcweb.org
