I once wrote a profile on Bruce Norris for Chicago magazine. This was about eight years ago—after he’d pissed people off with evil-minded satires like The Pain and the Itch, but before they anointed him with a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony for Clybourne Park. The profile (which, I have to say, is very good) examines Norris’s perverse charm. He’s quoted at one point saying that Steppenwolf Theatre artistic director Martha Lavey “has referred to me as a ‘perseverator’: I enjoy things that are hectoring and terrierlike [and] refuse to drop the topic. I’ve driven people away from dinner tables. If I get something stuck in my ass that I refuse to let go of, it’s horrible—and yet it’s thrilling for me to hammer someone. . . . To have them cave. Just to scourge them of their folly.”
And what a bunch they are. If Teri is Chris’s wet dream of sanctioned infidelity, her friends are neatly calibrated to trigger his most uptight nightmares. Deb is fat, loud, overly familiar, and come-to-mama uncouth, calling Chris a “cutie patootie” and referring to Kristy as his “lady.” She arrives with her “big, chocolate Nubian god,” Ken, whose fey mannerisms scare the hell out of Chris. Then there’s Regine, of French-Caribbean extraction, with an accent and a taste for scenarios out of The Story of O to prove it. Regine’s mate is Roger, who probably read Atlas Shrugged at an impressionable age and took it deeply to heart. Roger is smug, territorial, and an energetic perseverator in his own right.
He almost certainly couldn’t have accomplished that without ace director Pam MacKinnon and an astonishing supporting cast whose members absolutely refuse to portray swinging as a joke. Or, more accurately, as anything less than a rich, subtle, complex joke. Karen Aldridge is at once playful and fiercely earnest, even in a bustier, as Regine. Paul Oakley Stovall’s Ken displays all the insouciance of a Nubian god while subverting Chris’s various misconceptions about him. David Pasquesi tells us all we need to know about Roger the alpha male with the snide way he asks, “What do you do, Chris?” And I’d pay to see 90 minutes of Kristen Fitzgerald alone on a stage as Deb, the character is so engaging and supple and—despite Chris’s no-fatties prejudice—attractive.
Through 8/31: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM; also Wed 8/13-8/27, 2 PM Steppenwolf Theatre Company, downstairs theater 1650 N. Halsted 312-335-1650steppenwolf.org $20-$86
