Dealer’s Choice
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Arming themselves against any repeat of this financial fiasco, Roadworks has not only produced fine drama but marketed three separate plays cleverly aimed at three different but overlapping audiences. Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice is a superbly executed drama meant to appeal to a general audience, Daniel MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone is a late-night satire of corporate America perfect for the office buddies, and Jose Rivera’s Maricela de la Luz Lights the World is a daytime children’s show to which everyone can bring the kids. Perhaps it’s unfortunate that survival in today’s brutal theater economy seems to require such a targeted approach and that astute professionalism wins out over the risky and experimental. But there can be little quarrel with the intelligence and versatility demonstrated here in perhaps the best main-stage, the best late-night, and the best kids’ shows of the year–certainly the best triple bill I’ve seen as a theater critic in Chicago.
Five idiosyncratic losers and dreamers gather every Sunday in a London restaurant for a game. Restaurant owner Stephen compulsively keeps score and regards poker as a test of discipline; for him the game is his only opportunity to see and attempt to reform his wayward son Carl, a meek, perennially broke gambling addict who views poker as a game of risk and passion. For the employees of Stephen’s restaurant, the game is an escape. Headwaiter Mugsy, who shuffles grandly and invents ridiculously complex games, dreams quixotically of opening his own restaurant in what used to be a public toilet. Womanizing waiter Frankie is a rash and thoughtless bettor practicing for his move to Las Vegas, where he wants to become a professional. And the undisciplined chef Sweeney, who’s lost custody of his daughter and routinely drinks too much and loses his shirt, is just trying to make enough money to treat his child for an afternoon. The arrival of professional gambler Ash–Carl invites him to fleece the others in order to clear up a debt–shows how impossible their petty dreams are.
Satire of corporate culture in the 90s is pretty passe, but I’ve never seen it done more wittily or entertainingly. The show never drags or turns trite; the moment you wonder if it will be able to sustain the energy, it ends in a flash. MacIvor’s dialogue is so quick it sounds like Mamet’s Hollywood types in Speed-the-Plow at 78 rpm. And Danny McCarthy and Matt Gibson as Bill and Frank give a brilliantly timed tag-team performance that’s as much a triumph of athleticism and concentration as of acting.
