Mere Mortals
Woody Allen has been doing this for years, transforming his simpleminded takes on existentialism and Ingmar Bergman into hours of moviegoing fun. More recently Steve Martin has staked his claim to this territory, recycling theatrical ideas that were hip before your mother was born and getting credit as a fresh new voice in American theater. But unlike Aristophanes, Swift, Wilde, Shaw, or any of the real heavyweight comic writers in the Western tradition, Allen and Martin would never offend their affluent audience’s sensibilities or challenge its worldview. It’s much easier to play to people’s prejudices and pocket the dough.
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David Ives is the most recent pretender to this pseudointellectual throne–or pseudointellectual heir to this pretend throne. But if the Organic Theater Company’s dreary Chicago-premiere production of his 1997 show Mere Mortals is any indication, he’s not even the pretender he pretends to be.
Ives also gets a lot of mileage out of the old modernist trick of mixing high and low cultural references to create a work more lively than a treatise but smarter than your average Hanna-Barbera cartoon. In the one-act “Mere Mortals,” Ives gives us three working stiffs right out of The Honeymooners, then has them speak to one another like college professors. This comic turn yields some easy laughs, but when it comes time for Ives to do something more than just make us laugh, he abruptly ends the sketch. Likewise in “Dr. Fritz” Ives uses dozens of old vaudeville bits about kooky doctors and hapless patients to suggest a statement about identity and the existence of God, then settles for a quick laugh and fast exit line.
I haven’t always been appreciative of Kimbrough’s talents in the past, but Mere Mortals has made a believer of me. With a few more like her in the show, it might have been palatable. As it is, all of Ives’s flaws–his glib wit, devotion to whatever’s current, and almost pathological inability to look beneath the surface of things–are blindingly obvious.
