I hardly ever consult another critic’s review of a play before I’ve written my own, but when I noticed that Amelia Roper’s Zürich was enthusiastically received in its original production by a Brooklyn company called Colt Coeur, I just had to find out why. My experience of Steep Theatre’s current Chicago staging, directed by Brad DeFabo Akin, was anything but positive. I found it grim, tedious, reductive, contrived, pedantic, self-evident, and confrontational in petty ways. No, I didn’t care for it. The best I could think as I went over it in my head, considering a moment here, an exchange there, was how much better it would’ve played as a comedy.
In that first scene that so tickled the New Yorker critic, two nameless near strangers face the morning after their one-night stand, “He” feeling good enough to belt out “The Star-Spangled Banner” while standing half naked atop the bed, “She” warily trying strategy after strategy for getting him out of her room. The second scene pits an up-and-coming but ethically challenged African-American lawyer against a hotel housemaid with an agenda of her own. Three introduces us to two kids, an 11-year-old boy and his 13-year-old sister, who go through their dysfunctional parents’ luggage, finding things they don’t care to see, while waiting for said parents to return from the argument they’ve decided to take outside. Four gives us Fryda, a German Jew who makes phone call after frustrating phone call attempting to penetrate a Kafkaesque Swiss banking hierarchy as she searches for an account confiscated from her grandmother during the Holocaust. Finally, we visit with the oddest couple of the bunch: an elderly American lady and the twentysomething orderly who helped her escape an old people’s home.
Through 11/10: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Steep Theatre, 1115 W. Berwyn, 773-649-3186, steeptheatre.com, $10-$38.
