What Does That Mean?
It might be tempting to dismiss John Corwin as just one more solipsistic off-Loop playwright so short on ideas he’s penned yet another play about self-absorbed actors. But unlike the flood of true-to-life navel gazers in Chicago, Corwin uses the theater as a metaphor for something larger–the human propensity to turn real-life romance into drama and other people into fictional characters. He seems fascinated by the way people cast and recast their friends and lovers to satisfy their own warped ideals of love. But this simplistic summation hardly begins to capture Corwin’s newest play, What Does That Mean?, a cryptic and demanding work as intriguing as it is impenetrable.
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Corwin is an unapologetically difficult playwright, borrowing from Ionesco, Pinter, and Albee–and adding a generous dash of Mamet. Like his closest aesthetic cousin in Chicago, Ian Pierce, Corwin has cobbled together a semiabsurdist, metatheatrical approach that rarely gives an audience easy access to his brooding, hard-edged fantasies. What Does That Mean? is hard work.
But the real problem lies in his handling of the relationship between the man and the woman. All we know is that he cheated on her and lied about it. Attending to the intricate dynamics of his play within a play, Corwin has little time to dramatize his characters’ crisis. And while it’s apparently his intention to merely suggest their predicament, adding to the play’s mystery, unfortunately they’re a couple by proclamation only. Their crisis remains somewhat perfunctory, and the scene never develops any real stakes.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): theater still by Isabel Raci.
