An engaging cast and a very user-friendly production are giving a good professional sendoff at Goodman Theatre to Lydia R. Diamond’s showy new drama, “The Gift Horse.”
The play — developed in part at Chicago Dramatists and winner of the 15th annual Theodore Ward Prize for African-American playwrights sponsored by Columbia College — focuses on Ruth, a vivacious young woman who springs onto the stage of the Owen Bruner Goodman auditorium and immediately begins confiding her life story to the audience.
Everyone in the play, in fact, relates to the folks seated out front, as well as to each other: Ernesto, Ruth’s dearest, gay friend; Brian, her divorced therapist, with whom she falls in love and marries; Bill, Ernesto’s first, disastrous love; Noah, his second, happy-ending lover; and Jordan, the sprightly cellist, perched above the action on an upper platform, where she philosophizes, plays music and urges the customers to get to know her better.
Diamond, an actress as well as a writer, is a clever quipster in her dialogue, and she has woven into her tale of Ruth’s journey into womanhood a gallery of perilous personal histories reflecting a host of social issues.
Ruth, for example, must first confront a traumatic experience of child abuse in her past and, having dealt with that, she must then face the fact that her husband does not want her to have a child. Ernesto, whose story runs parallel to and mixes with Ruth’s, falls madly in love with Bill, who nonchalantly describes himself as “a Renaissance man” but who turns out to be, in Ernesto’s words, “a psychopathic boyfriend who left me with a disease that won’t go away.”
Diamond is a writer of quick wit and show-off invention, and she is determined to involve her audience in the action. Yet despite her play’s smart characters and its polyps of bright soliloquies, and despite the busy, contemporary edge to the drama, its situations sometimes smack of soap opera; and the many jokey lines the playwright gives her characters eventually sound as if they’ve been turned out for a TV situation comedy’s laugh track.
The twists and turns of the play’s scene collage, and its surprise ending, are negotiated with great skill by director Chuck Smith; and the actors, under his guidance, are consistently eager to ingratiate themselves.
As Ruth, Lynn M. House is appealingly sassy in her personality but annoyingly fussy in her body language, which makes Tim Edward Rhoze’s stolid presence as her therapist/lover/ husband a blessing.
Andrew Navarro is appropriately endearing and winsome as Ernesto, supported by Christian Kohn as the wickedly enticing Bill and Alfred Kemp as the ideally dreamy Noah.
Yvonne Huff, as Jordan, the cellist, exudes charm as she engages in chipper interplay with the audience on the sidelines for much of the play, and she takes command of the story when she moves to center stage for the final round of revelations and reflections.
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“The Gift Horse”
When: Through March 3
Where: Owen Bruner Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Phone: 312-443-3800
