Douglas Carter Beane’s “The Country Club” is a fairly good, very brittle examination of the stinging WASPs and 30ish, variously disappointed swells of Wyomissing, Pa.
Making its Chicago premiere via the Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, the play follows Beane’s “As Bees in Honey Drown,” a better, more unruly work dissecting the late 20th Century cult of celebrity worship. “Club” has in its favor a tidy structure and many sharp jokes, as well as a callow streak redeemed, off and on, by those jokes.
Soos (Connie Canaday Howard) has returned to her hometown following a split with her husband. She falls back into the old crowd half-reluctantly. Early on Pooker (Christy Bell) informs Soos that her old high school beau, a preening haircut known as Zip (Nathan Vogt), is single: Why not a reacquaintance fling?
But Zip has other things on his mind, chiefly Chloe (Antonia Dunbar — more on her later), the working-class Italian Catholic wife of Zip’s pal Hutch (Joe Gordon). Chloe is everything these smug, scared Republican Protestants are not. Desperately coiled Froggy (Amy Fulgham) and her mouse of a husband, Bri (David W.R. Inglis), represent the outer reaches of the moneyed hypocrisy Beane’s play takes for granted.
Taking something for granted doesn’t make it hilarious, however. The writing beams on and off. Everyone has their dirty little secrets, their “little stories,” as Pooker says. “And no one brings them up. That’s what’s known as community spirit.” Nice left hook there. Beane lands another punch with Bri’s drunken spiel about having missed out on the Vietnam war.
But in total the play depends utterly on the right offhandedness in performance, and that’s where director Kurt Naebig’s staging runs into trouble. As Soos, Howard does nicely, though hers is a busy portrait in need of some watchfulness. Fulgham’s grating caricature exists on a separate planet from Vogt’s low-keyed but misjudged Zip. (The guy comes off like a smarmy date-rapist.) And, as promised in the program, “all cigarettes on stage will remain unlit” — not the best idea, for a play whose characters are constantly lighting up. Or, in this case, not.
With her cat-that-ate-the-canary charisma, Dunbar has the advantage of playing least off-putting character. Beyond that, though, she lends a no-nonsense enjoyment and honesty to her assignment. The nude scene in “The Country Club” may belong to Vogt and Gordon — and a wholly gratuitous nude scene it is — but Dunbar’s the one to watch.
“The Country Club”
When: Through March 23
Where: Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, McAninch Arts Center at College of DuPage, 425 Fawell Blvd., Glen Ellyn
Phone: 630-942-4000
