Jan. 12--At one point in "No Wake," an intense, three-character drama about a divorced couple dealing with the death of the estranged child they failed to understand, one of the parents wonders aloud how she came to raise a young woman who could so despise her own mother.
It's a poignant question, an intense version of what many parents wonder when they look at their angry or alienated offspring. In most such cases, the rifts are temporary, thank heavens, but this 2010 play by the Massachusetts playwright William Donnelly deals with a situation of agonizing permanence: The young woman has committed suicide.
Alas, we never really find out the answer to the mother's question, a scenario that became, for me, increasingly problematic Sunday afternoon as this play wended its way through 90 minutes of traffic on the stage of the Greenhouse Theater Center, where the Route 66 Theatre Company is staging the Chicago premiere. It includes some top-drawer Chicago actors: Stef Tovar, Lia Mortensen and Raymond Fox.
Donnelly is not especially interested in the reason for the suicide -- he's painting more of a portrait of grief, something akin to David Lindsay-Abaire's far-superior work "The Rabbit Hole," except that the pain is made all the more acute by the bereaved parents' inability to comfort each other, given the complexity of their ongoing relationship (or lack thereof). The third character in this triangular drama is, in fact, the new husband of the bereaved mother. And thus you have three adults in pain all trying to navigate their way through an impossible time of their lives.
My central issue with director Kimberly Senior's rather underexplored production is -- to be frank -- that the pain is insufficiently acute. I'm not speaking of some need for sentiment or bathos or flowing tears, but there has to be enough of a sense of the unspeakable horror of this kind of loss. Sure, people carry on. Sure, people drink at wakes. Sure, people find a way to laugh. And it's true that sexual needs and desires can come into play when other defenses have tumbled into the earth and closed doors find a way to open. All of those activities make up this play. Those activities are this play. Which is fine, as far as it goes.
But somehow I found myself in at least partial resistance -- the trio of skilled, if muted, performances notwithstanding -- to the notion that all of this triangular relationship stuff -- ambiguous foot rubs and all -- was happening in the wake of what purportedly had just gone down. Everything felt just too normalized. Part of that issue, I think, comes from the script, which has a way of raising the kinds of existential questions that flow into your mind at such times, only to race away from them whenever they really come into focus, or threaten the careful structure of the work.
Plays about grief are not easy. You can see Tovar trying his considerable best to capture a guy made numb by what has just upended his entire existence; you can see Mortensen beginning to explore stoicism and regret. And the weighty Fox is richly evocative as an emotional third-wheel, a man who feels like he has no rights to share this pain and also no idea how much to assert himself, and how much bad behavior to tolerate.
Still, there are times when you crave more dislocation in this script, more poetic risk, more of the raw truth of loss and, of course, the imperative of going on with life.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
When: Through Feb. 7
Where: Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $35 at 773-404-7336 or greenhousetheater.org
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