Best terrain for ‘Nebraska’
Last Modified: Mar 28, 2011 07:45PM
Redtwist Theatre’s staggeringly powerful production of “The Man from Nebraska” is a clear demonstration that THIS is the play that should have won Tracy Letts the Pulitzer Prize.
First produced by Steppenwolf Theatre in 2003 — four years before the arrival of his megahit “August: Osage County” — it has very little of the tabloid sensationalism of that later work, though when it DOES want to make points about sex, drugs, rock and roll, art, faith, freedom, and all the rest, it is a pure knockout. A work of immense intimacy, maturity and keen understanding, “The Man from Nebraska” has the power to shake you to the core, but it also proceeds to leave you all the wiser for the earthquake-like emotional cracks it creates. The supremely insightful, stunningly acted production by Redtwist (a storefront theater that never fails to surprise, and that recently staged a wonderful revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Lobby Hero”), might just be the defining version of the play. It is not to be missed.
The midlife crisis story Letts limns might not be terribly unusual. But his telling of it, and its rendering here by Andrew Jessop — a major young directing talent who also happens to be a gifted actor and designer — is marked by a special music and intensity. Several of the play’s most devastating scenes are enacted with few or no words at all, and they make the more raucous, verbally zinging scenes that are such a Letts trademark all the more powerful.
It begins as we follow the clearly long-entrenched rituals of a modest businessman, Ken Carpenter (Chuck Spencer in an altogether brilliant performance), and his wife of 40 years, Nancy (an exquisitely calibrated portrayal by Jan Ellen Graves). A blandly predictable but devoted couple, they live in an ordinary house in Lincoln, Nebraska and are the parents of two grown daughters out on their own. On weekends they move mechanically between stops at the Baptist church, the nursing home where Ken’s mother is dying, and the cafeteria where they have little to say to each other over dinner.
And then it happens. Ken suddenly suffers a terrifying, upending crisis that he explains as the loss of belief in God, though it is far more a loss of belief in his own unexamined or fully experienced life. Unable to shake the feeling he does the unimaginable, at least for him — “taking a break” from Nancy and heading off to London to do who knows what.
A brief sexual encounter (at once hilarious and bittersweet) with an aggressive, divorced businesswoman he meets on the plane (played ideally by Jane deLaubenfels), might be the key that unlocks Ken. But far more important is his winningly imagined friendship with Tamyra (the stunning Adrian Snow, who nails her character to perfection), a beautiful young black woman who works as a bartender in his London hotel, and lives with her brainy, arrogant lover, Harry (Andrew J. Pond, who could give Christian Bale a run for his money), who happens to be a masterful sculptor.
In Letts’ subtle interweaving of love, sex, loneliness, art, money, freedom and mortality, the supporting players are crucial, too, with ideal turns by Julie Dahlinger as Ken’s angry daughter; Marssie Mencotti as his aged mother; Michael Sherwin as the Baptist preacher who is simple but not stupid; and Sam Perry as the preacher’s elderly but still salty dad.
Stephen H. Carmody’s vest-pocket set and Christopher Kriz’s ideal musical scoring could not be better for this play that probes so deeply and movingly.
Copyright © 2011 — Sun-Times Media, LLC
