“Moon Under Miami,” which had its premiere Sunday night, is destined to go down as one of the great train wrecks of Chicago theater history.
Not since David Mamet’s disastrous “Lone Canoe” left opening-night audiences slack-jawed with disbelief 16 years ago at Goodman Theatre has there been anything like this rash, undisciplined, ill-conceived lollapalooza of a play.
It’s not without its happy moments. It’s such an impossibly awkward attempt at hip zaniness that it’s forever fascinating to see what gaucherie is going to come along next. It has, in rare instances, real patches of lunatic farce; and, when words fail, there is always the bright cartoon pop scenery of Red Grooms, which spills out from the stage and into the far reaches of the Organic Theatre.
But, for all the labor that has gone into its making, this is still a Humpty Dumpty of a show, broken into a hundred mismatched bits and pieces.
The script, a patchwork of teenage bravado and liberal paranoia, is, amazingly, the work of John Guare, a great American playwright with a brilliant theatrical imagination.
In this instance, however, he has reverted to dumb-dumb status, grabbing for cheap laughs with dirty words and dirtier jokes which, even in the context of the sleazy Miami nightclub where they’re spoken, are gross and embarrassing.
The story, which seems to be the result of scores of scattershot rewrites, concerns FBI agent Otis Presby (Will Clinger), an innocent among sharks, who is out to nail the dirty guys selling dope to the Eskimos.
Following a southern trail from his post on an Alaskan iceberg to the Boom Boom Room in Miami, Presby runs into, among others, a corrupt congressman from Alaska, a Jewban politician (his father was Jewish, his mother was Cuban), a foulmouthed gangster, his world-weary mistress, an Arab sheik, a crazed FBI agent, and, finally, a resurrected J. Edgar Hoover.
Accompanying the plot is lots of music, mostly by Guare, with some bits from Galt MacDermot, supplied by an off-stage instrumental quartet, an on-stage female vocal trio, and the hero and his girlfriend, a nurse who has formed the Everglades Operetta Society.
In this attempt at satire, Guare has mixed Marx Brothers farce with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy duets, sweet sentiment with filthy jokes, high-minded hopes with low-down cynicism, retread situations with show business in-jokes.
Once in a while, a glimmer of the poignance and humor, or sheer joyous nonsense, of which Guare is a master emerges. Pausing in the midst of a madcap scam in a hotel room, the Latino politician exclaims how much he loves that song from “Annie,” and bursts into “Manana! Manana! Te amo, manana!”
Such bits of inspired silliness are rare, however. Mostly, it’s just plodding along through the confusion, despite the frenetic efforts of director Neel Keller and the game cast of the Remains Theatre production.
Larry McCauley, as the agent who idolizes J. Edgar Hoover, expends enough energy for eight farces, and Noe Cuellar has come up with a wonderful blank look of stupidity for his dippy Miami politician.
At play’s end, they’re all smiling as they join in one big final chorus of song. Are they happy, or are they just relieved that they managed to get through this crazy night without going totally under?
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“Moon Under Miami” plays through June 11 at the Organic Theatre, 3319 N. Clark St. Phone 312-335-9800.
