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January 5 2004,
To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, it's a short road from the pinch to the paunch. Chicago's long-established Factory Theatre prefers a bunch of sad-sack white guys moaning about relationships in a North Side tavern to, say, an erudite musical in a minor key, but fear of middle age comes in multiple aesthetic flavors.
"Here Comes a Regular," an original comedy by Nick Digilio and Mike Vieau, is the latest entry in that most noble and glorious of native Chicago theatrical genres: the dysfunctional-straight-guys-sitting-around-complaining-in-a-Wrigleyville-bar play. Anyone who's served their time in local storefronts can smell the tropes of this beloved local style quicker than the odor of stale beer can waft down Clark Street.
Usually the bar itself is under siege. In this current case, a formerly righteously Chicago-style tavern (re-created in splendid detail inside Stage Left Theatre) is under new management and has begun such gentrified horrors as pushing real ale, pouring with pourers, promoting chicken appetizers, and replacing the jukebox with preprogrammed satellite fare. The new barkeep-Todd Oldham's annoyingly shrill 22-year-old "bartender-manager" with a penchant for Justin Timberlake-even needs the adjective "Wild" to understand a request for Turkey.
Into this once-great bar stagger five former regulars in their late '30s (including the uneasy Digilio and the sad-eyed Vieau themselves) for a Monday night boozing reunion and macho-therapy session.
One has just been dumped. One was cheated upon. One is married to a glamorous woman who treats him poorly. One now carries a big pack of Huggies. One has an exhausting blue-collar job. One gets the idea. Neither the bar nor the lives are what they once were. And over the course of 90 minutes, the gents kvetch and moan and engage in that peculiarly male habit of seeking intimacy through abuse.
There's not a scrap of originality in the setup-I saw a similar play about a threatened North Side bar performed upstairs at the Cubby Bear not long ago. And the play lacks a decent ending. But "Here Comes a Regular" is attracting sold-out crowds, and it looks set to become a little cult hit.
That's mainly because it's written with uncommon intelligence and satirical edge and is unpretentious, local, alive and very, very funny. The characters-penned, one suspects, for specific actors-are entertainingly self-loathing souls and there's lots of caustic dialogue, droll banter and enough other class- and gender-fueled amusements that big laughs float in waves through the theater all night.
One relationship, we learn with great hilarity, blew apart because she found Ira Glass to be profoundly wise, while he thought the NPR sophist to be a pretentious idiot who's all about being too good ever to open Entertainment Weekly. What conflicts in life are more acute?
Copyright © 2003, The Chicago Tribune |
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