Light Years Away

Take Me – Strawdog Theatre Company

Shelley works in a call center for a less than great telephone company. She used to be an architect, but following a plane crash that leaves her husband in a coma and the disappearance of her son, the task of punting people’s complaints is all she can handle. In her search for stability and meaning, she stumbles into a group of people who say they have been abducted by aliens, and that those aliens want her to build an amusement park in Roswell, New Mexico.

This show has charm and imagination to spare, but unfortunately, I don’t think the finished product is more than the sum of its parts. I think the core problem is that none of the elements really bonded together into a cohesive whole. The cliche about musicals is a cliche because it’s true: when it’s too big to talk about you sing about it. The song is supposed to be an extension and expansion of the story. It has to either explain something about the character or progress the story in a way that simple dialogue could not. The book and the score in this show seem to keep getting in each other’s way. When the dialogue is about to get to something important, a song that doesn’t expand on that jumps in, and when the cast seems to just be having a good time with the music, it stops to return to the story. The music itself is fine, if a little repetitive in places (by the fifth time you’ve sung a line, you have to ask yourself why and if there isn’t some change that would better serve the song), but without being anchored to the story, the music never really gets better than ‘fine.’ Both the author, Mark Guarino, and composer, Jon Langford, have experience in adapting and playing with country and folk music, and they do so here. It should work like gangbusters – a uniquely American form of music and an almost uniquely American phenomenon, the alien abduction – but the two parts just never come together.

The other major issue for me is that the fantastical elements seem to obscure rather than enhance the story. I’m all on board for non-linear or contradictory narratives. Those can be fun, the book for this show felt like every narrative device you could name was thrown at the story. Pieces like Shelley talking to her comatose husband as if she were guiding his plane for a landing work, but a city council chaired by the descendants of the first Soviet cosmonaut dogs went a little off the rails for me. The show describes itself as a “comic fantasia,” but honestly that feels a like a phrase intentionally designed to retroactively justify any choice they made in creating the show. What couldn’t be a part of a comic fantasia?

That all said, the actors here are really good. Up and down the line, they are good actors and good singers and I wish the book gave them more to work with, or at least got out of their way. One actor I want to single out for praise is Kamille Dawkins. I saw her last fall in Strawdog’s production of The Revolutionists and she was phenomenal there and was fantastic here as well as Doggie, the manifestation of Shelley’s childhood toy dog. She injected her scenes with energy and she connected with the other characters and the audience in a way I found absent in a lot of the other scenes.

I also want to compliment the set design. It relies on a series of projectors around the room to project images and movement. Unlike some shows I’ve seen that end up as glorified PowerPoint presentations, this show used the set up well and the imagery was largely beautiful and intriguing.

At the heart of this show is a pretty solid story. A woman who chooses to believe aliens kidnapped her husband and child rather than face the dread of their loss in an interesting spin on the idea of running from the truth to escape pain. I think if both the music and fantastical trappings were pruned back to let that story shine through, this show could really be something to see. As it stands, none of the elements connect with each other, and thus, the audience. It’s a shame because the cast is clearly talented and charming as all get out, and there are a handful of genuine laughs over the night. Because of that, I want to like this more than I do, but unfortunately, by the end of the (too long, by the way) second act, I was just bored.

Not Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented May 10-June 22 by Strawdog Theatre Company, 1802 W. Berenice Ave., Chicago.

Tickets are available by visiting www.strawdog.org.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found at www.theatreinchicago.com.