Oct. 20--Alas, "The Terrible" is pretty terrible.
Morgan McNaught's new play, which premiered Monday night at The Den Theatre as a New Colony production under the shrill direction of Jesse Roth, is billed as a dark comedy. Dark does not even begin to describe it. Torturous would be more accurate, given both the content of the work and the experience of spending 80 minutes in its company.
The piece is set in a kind of purgatory. However, McNaught's play makes the hellish room imagined by John-Paul Sartre in "No Exit" look like Disneyland.
In "The Terrible," three dead characters of diverse backgrounds, played by Chris Fowler, Jessica London-Shields and Shariba Rivers, find themselves at the behest of Fred (Andrew Hobgood), a warped psychotherapist whose methods include torturing his charges by pushing the button on his ballpoint pen and unleashing electroshock therapy. This Fred, a real charmer in a bow tie, also enjoys making the dead relive the worst day of their lives, which might well be the day on which they died. When you add the shocks, the psychological torture and all manner of other horrors, your head starts to go to the obvious questions -- there are three of the dead and one of Fred, so why don't they take the sucker down?
Eventually, they do. But that arrives long after such a moment has presented itself. Moreover, McNaught also has built into her room an exit portal, which then raises the question, why don't they all just leave? The play has various weird arguments why not, and the characters are, as you might imagine, off their game. Being dead, and all. But those flimsy rationales, they don't stand up so well against a reality where a guy with a pen is sending you into spasms every few seconds.
Perhaps The New Colony sees this as a tongue-in-cheek Halloween attraction. But such attractions generally are better off with at least a modicum of wit, none of which is in evidence here, and at least one foot in that great haunted house of believability. There's no discernible sociopolitical motivation and certainly no credibility. The production is overplayed. Emotional resonance is minimal. And I just can't conceive of another reason to ask an audience to show up, pay money and watch characters being tortured.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
"The Terrible" -- 1 star
When: Through Nov. 21
Where: Den Theatre, 1333 N. Milwaukee Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Tickets: $20-$25 at www.thenewcolony.org
