Aug. 30--The Mississippi-raised playwright Beth Henley -- best known for penning "Crimes of the Heart" -- has as much affection for the label "Southern Gothic" as her fellow scribe Sarah Ruhl does for the adjective "whimsical." Although the former descriptor has a more legitimate claim to an actual literary movement than the latter, they're both potentially condescending catch-alls for singularity or deviance from realism.
You might call Henley's 2013 drama "The Jacksonian" an example of Southern Gothic in that it is set in a heartache-fueled motel and concerns itself with murder. (There was a lot of bloodshed all around Jackson, Miss., in 1965, the year of the play's setting.) Its characters are, to say the least, colorful sorts, be they the divorcing dentist seeking refuge, the bartender with agendas far beyond mixing a killer Mississippi Punch, or the potty-mouthed maid with the curves and the racist mouth. The piece is structured as a whodunit, but whereas most pot-boilers merely use their cultural backdrop as urbane atmosphere, "The Jacksonian" interacts with Jackson, circa 1965, far more politically, suggesting that the crime at the heart of the motel is merely one manifestation of the racist poison in the city water supply.
"The Jacksonian," which is a very interesting and complicated play, hasn't been seen in Chicago before, even though Robert Falls, the Goodman Theatre's artistic director, directed the well-received premiere in both Los Angeles and New York, where the cast included Bill Pullman, Glenne Headly, Amy Madigan and Ed Harris. Weirdly, the Goodman itself then passed on the show (you might say Falls passed on himself, or couldn't work out a deal with schedules and whatnot), meaning that the play was passed along to Profiles Theatre, where "The Jacksonian" opened Saturday night under the direction of Joe Jahraus and with a cast that includes Rachel Sledd, Juliana Liscio, Christian Isely, Betsy Bowman and, as the blood-stained dentist, Tim Curtis.
The production features a notably sophisticated two-story design from Katie-Bell Springmann -- a clash of 1960s motel-cool with sleazy Southern parochialism -- and more than a few stirring moments of fevered comic drama that benefit from the intimate setting. Some of the shrewdly penned scenes work well; in particular, Curtis captures his tooth doctor's pathetic attempts at retaining dignity while living in a motel on a permanent basis. But the dramatic enterprise also suffers from an approach that feels overly vested in the pesky Southern Gothic genre, frankly, at the expense of forging characters whom we believe actually might have existed in Jackson at that moment -- just two years on from an incident at the local Woolworth's lunch counter when some of the white residents of Jackson demonstrated the behavior of which they were capable.
The piece has a narrator -- 16-year-old Rosy Perch, daughter of the dentist and his estranged wife, Susan, and a teen under pressure who fears what is coming. Liscio, a young Chicago actress, sets off Rosy with all kinds of layers of Southern strangeness, but that works against Job One, which is to set up the story and involve us in its denouement. Speaking generally, the show badly needs more dramatic tension.
The cast creates a colorful array of Jacksonians seeking refuge of one kind or another, but not all of the roles feel fully inhabited. The denizens of the motel come off more as externally fused eccentrics when they needed to be more credible, more real. The stakes in the show don't rise as they should -- mostly, I think, because the actors all seem to be trying too hard to create a collision of oddballs when Henley actually has written this piece with a noir nod to the cool and the angular.
Those qualities -- which are not usually ascribed to the South -- are what the play needs, rather than the ambience we actually get, one more suited, really, to "Crimes of the Heart," a very different play by a deceptively tricky American scribe, one who is not so easily confined to genre.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
When: Through Oct. 11
Where: Profiles Theatre, 4147 N. Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $30-$40 at 773-549-1815 or profilestheatre.org
