March 10--A neighborhood halfway to gentrification offers all sorts of ideological clashes between the working-class old guard and their moneyed new brethren. And Chicago's Uptown, where Neil Connelly has set his play, certainly fits that description at the moment.
The owner of a bike shop has been hit by a cab and killed. The play begins just after this event, as his employees attempt to pick up the pieces. His estranged siblings have other plans for the place -- namely, selling off the real estate while the getting's good.
It's the Lincoln Park yuppies versus the "hipster hobos," and if that sounds schematic, it's also a tried-and-true source of dramatic material if done right. I'm not sure "Ride" (from Under the Rug Theatre Company) is quite there yet, but it has a major talent in Rose Freeman at its center playing a disheveled, amusingly mouthy, devil-may-care denizen/mascot of the bike shop who proves to be its beating heart by the end.
This is apparently Freeman's stage debut ("acting in a play for the first time as an adult," per her bio) but you wouldn't know it. Though surrounded by a cast of four, the show lives or dies based on her performance, which is full of quirks and delicious one-liners that might feel labored in lesser hands. "So I had a beer for breakfast ..." she says to no one in particular in the first line of the play. It's the type of role Jack Black has wrapped in a bear hug to varying degrees over the years. Freeman puts her own spin on the type, playing a childlike tomboy of a woman who is both a mess and a fully evolved person with a set of principles. She feels entirely human and entirely real.
Alas, that is not the case for others in this story, specifically Todd Wojcik as the brother of the deceased who chucks his partnership at an architecture firm to work at the bike shop. Wojcik brings honesty to the guy's earnestness and I like that we don't know precisely what is drawing him to the shop. But the tonal sensibility of the character is off. Architects operate on their own level of style and cool, and while it might be a more high-end presentation than that of the bike shop hipsters, it feels like a miscalculation to style this character (in look and outlook) as a middle manager type in a cheap suit. Annie Prichard, who plays his sister, isn't given much to do beyond her role as a shrill and villainous counterpoint to the more authentic shop workers, which feels like a cheat. The deck shouldn't be so entirely stacked, not if you want an audience to stay with you.
John Ross Wilson's scenic design is just right, a comfortably beat-up shop filled with bikes and bike accessories, with a big red Chicago star behind the counter -- and yet that very design tends to be in conflict with the way Wilson uses the space as a director. There's a repetitive feeling to the blocking, which gives the production a claustrophobic, numbing feel.
"Target or no Target, you can't get rid of us," says Del (a wonderfully laid-back Abe Elmourabit) of the encroaching big-box store. Del is a fixture in the neighborhood and earns his living "finding and fixing and fixing and finding" discarded bits of furniture and other detritus. But we only get glimpses of him, and this points to another missing piece -- a sense of a whole gang of regulars hanging out at this bike shop, just shooting the breeze and (this key for an audience) showing us why they might be such appealing company rather than smug cliches.
That said, the casting of Elmourabit as well as Alex Dauphin (as a enigmatic if clenched shop employee) reveals how vital it is to populate a show with non-white actors, thereby creating a world that actually resembles the city we live in.
REVIEW: "Ride" by Under the Rug Theatre Company
2 STARS
Through April 3 at The Den Theatre, 1333 N. Milwaukee Ave.; tickets are $25 at 617-721-0675 or undertherugtheatre.com
nmetz@tribpub.com
