Ready for the River
By Adam Langer
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A theater like this is the great equalizer: it allows no sleight of hand, no fancy tricks, nothing to distract an audience from the play and the performances. Put a brilliant production of Hamlet in the SweetCorn Playhouse and the entire audience–all two rows of them–will be riveted. But give them Phantom of the Opera there and they’ll be running for the exits. Places like the SweetCorn Playhouse separate the great from the pretenders, the promising from the worthless. Phoniness, overacting, even poorly applied makeup are intolerable in such close quarters. As the saying goes in bad cop movies: One false move and you’re dead. There’s no escaping what’s onstage; it’s right there, within spitting distance. Great Beast’s production of Neal Bell’s Ready for the River, a flawed but thought-provoking play, takes on an immediacy here it might not have had in a more polished setting. And Sweetback’s depressingly sophomoric parody of white-trash life, ‘Gator Bait, reveals almost immediately just how little it has to offer.
“How far is far enough?” two characters ask at separate points in the narrative. Even in a country as vast as this one, it’s never far enough. No matter the distances Lorna and Doris travel, dangers and evils remain; one cannot overcome them, only acknowledge them and try to understand them better. The folk song and spiritual sung during the play–“Good Night, Irene” and “Shall We Gather at the River”– both take on the same sinister meaning, the “great notion to jump in the river and drown.”
If you find any of the following amusing–someone getting shot in the crotch and squirting blood from the pelvic region onto the audience, a tongueless retarded man routinely puking into a bowl that hangs around his neck, a hillbilly molesting the dead body of a woman he’s shot “in the cooch,” a man masturbating into a hand puppet that can’t talk back to him intelligibly because its mouth is full of semen, a man shitting in his pants and turning around to show the audience the results, a man getting killed with a snake rammed up his anus and another licking the excreta off the snake, or the original joke that country folk all sleep with their kin–‘Gator Bait might just make you laugh. If not, this material–coupled with the thought that a group of hardworking actors is taking the time to deliver this mindless gross-out fest–might just make you sick.
