And you think you have problems. Just listen to Renee, one of the characters in “After-Play”:
“My body parts are slowly disintegrating, my children are candidates for the Hitler Youth, and I have moments of despair that would terrify you.”
That’s one of the funnier lines in Anne Meara’s short, searing drama about growing old and dying.
There are other humorous bits scattered throughout the play’s 80 minutes, most of them hinging on embittered and despairing remarks. And yet, Meara wants this to be a healing experience, ending her play with the hope that the two couples it has so laceratingly exposed will survive the blows and come back for more.
Her method of getting at their physical and psychological pains is to bring them together for an after-theater supper.
Phil (Michael Guido), a television comedy writer, and Renee (Linda Kimbrough), his actress wife, have flown in from Los Angeles to be with their old friends Marty (Richard Henzel) and Terry (Nancy Baird). They’ve just seen a play–masterpiece or mere shtick, depending on who’s talking–and as they begin to give it an after-play analysis, they reveal themselves as well.
Phil, a heavy drinker, has a hateful son who overdosed on drugs the night his father received a TV award. Renee, whose kids also hate her, has had a mastectomy and breast reconstruction, about which she says, “My new breast looks better than my face.” Marty, an old actor yearning for the good old days, has a bad back. Terry, a former boozer, is off the hard stuff and into therapy.
They all carry what Renee calls scar tissue. “People our age,” she says, “have a lot of scar tissue. If we didn’t have scabs, we’d bleed to death.”
Near the end of the meal, and its attendant bitching and backbiting, Meara drops a real bombshell into the action by bringing on another couple (Wayne Brown and Annabel Armour) who, it quickly becomes obvious, are still bleeding hard. All of a sudden, in a devastating, heart-rending portrayal by Armour of a grieving mother, “After-Play” moves from smart-talk complaining to deep, inconsolable lamenting.
After that, the play has to come down to its former level of joking; but it’s Armour’s scene, and the unbearable sadness she brings to it, that will stay in your minds, long after the jokes have faded.
At the Organic/Touchstone Theatre, Steve Scott’s direction is smooth, lively and perhaps a little too stagy; and Guido, Kimbrough, Henzel and Baird breezily, if not always expertly, parry and thrust with Meara’s gag lines.
With its dyspeptic characters and cutting comments, it’s not an easy play to like; but every once in a while, when it cuts, it cuts true and to the bone.
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“After-Play”
When: Through Jan. 18
Where: Organic/Touchstone Company, 2851 N. Halsted St.
Phone: 773-404-4700
