Neighboring on Disturbed 

Right Now.

For those of you who remember their dreams, you’ve probably had some unsettling dream experiences where you’re talking to, say, your sister, and suddenly, without warning or volition, you realize that she has actually been, all along, an old boss or your high school gym teacher.  

Or maybe you’ve had the kind of dream where you’re at a cocktail party in your childhood home, and you know for a fact (in your dream, that is) that it’s your childhood home except that it looks absolutely nothing like it, and the walls keep floating away, and suddenly you are in a baseball stadium in Pittsburgh.

Keep those unsettling dark-of-night experiences in mind as you watch Facility Theatre’s U.S. premiere production of Quebecois playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin’s Right Now, translated by Chris Campbell and directed by Facility’s resident director, Dado.

The story centers on an attractive young married couple, an overworked physician and his wife, who have recently moved into their new apartment, and the oddball neighbors across the hall who gradually insert themselves into the passive and oddly complacent young couple’s lives to frequently comedic and Kramer-esque effect.

While the definitive history of 21st Century theatre has (to my knowledge) yet to be written, surely any such history would have to include the observation that contemporary audiences expect if not demand abundant comedy with every show, no matter how serious or dark the underlying intent.  (This was a mandate that Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams didn’t feel constrained to observe.) And so it is with the laugh-filled first half or so of this play, as we watch the ill-assorted neighbors from across the hall (an older married couple and their adult son) become increasingly intrusive, presumptuous and inexplicably strange.  However, any assumption that this play is a comedy — or even a black comedy or a satire of some sort — is leached away by the dawning realization that the young couple is nursing a secret grief.  To disclose the nature of this grief would be to give away the very crux of this play’s intent.  Suffice to say that the psyche of at least one of the principal characters fractures and shatters along some old and neglected fault lines as unresolved trauma irresistibly asserts itself. 

As the real world of the play gradually gives way to the dream logic that sprouts, mushroom-like, from the dark loam of deeply repressed horrors, the audience is in for a rough ride entailing psychological abuse, mental illness and delusional thinking, and certain quasi-erotic encounters that could best be described as being just next door to rape.  

There’s a shocker of an ending that is at once completely illogical, a tricky “technical” accomplishment (you’ll know why I put “technical” in quotes when you see the play), and yet oddly right and fitting within the surrealistic roller coaster ride that has just transpired. 

This is an excellent play that is very much worth seeing, despite some overly familiar tropes (including a disturbing sound effect that’s practically identical to one I saw in another play I just reviewed called The Writer) and some derivative themes concerning grief and trauma.

Among the cast, Maria Stephens stands out as the vivacious but haunted young wife, Alice.  Her stage presence is unfailingly vivid.  Also very fine are the next-door neighbors, Kirk Anderson as the sinister psychological researcher Gilles, Shawna Franks as his wife and the instigator of the intrusions, and Elliott Baker as their “second-favorite son.”  (The roles some of these characters play change somewhat, in a manner alluded to in the first paragraph of this review.)  Josh Odor does what he can as Alice’s exhausted physician husband.  He’s so low-key and soft-spoken at the beginning of the play that his transition, by the end, from laconic to catatonic is not nearly as startling as it should have been.  But the fault here, I suspect, is less about his performance than it is about an underwritten role and Toupin’s somewhat bumpy script.

A word here about Facility Theatre, whose powerful 2018 production of Jen Silverman’s post-apocalyptic fable Phoebe in Winter still sticks with me to this day.  Located next door to a run-down old dry cleaners called Sun Shine (talk about oddball neighbors), they consistently take on difficult and challenging original or rarely seen material and make it memorable and affecting.  Right Now is as good a time as any for an introduction to their excellent work. 

Recommended 

Reviewed by Michael Antman 

Presented October 26 – December 9 by Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California Ave.

Tickets are $25 (suggested donation, with pay-what-you-can options) at facilitytheatre.org.

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