`Fifteen years ago, I killed my sister,” is the dramatic first line of Adam Rapp’s “Nocturne,” a simple but very moving play that finally has arrived in Chicago after premiering with a widely acclaimed Boston staging at the American Repertory Theatre more than a year ago.
The death under debate here is not sororicide but the consequence of an automobile accident. In this 90-minute monologue, a middle-class man in his early 30s (played in Chicago by Lance Baker) stands in front of an audience and describes how his 9-year-old sister ran into the street out in front of his car. The brakes failed and the little girl was decapitated by her teenage brother’s vehicle. This accident sets in motion a terrible reactive chain that sends her mother to a mental institution and emotionally deadens her father.
But “Nocturne” primarily is concerned with the long-term effect of the accident on the girl’s agonized brother, a sometime pianist from Joliet who calls himself “Your Narrator.” Horrified by his role in the death, the young man runs away to New York and spends some 15 years hiding himself away in a used bookstore, unable to consummate a romantic relationship and terrified of even stepping inside a taxicab.
In essence, “Nocturne” is a play about the effects of grief. The effect of a young person’s death on the surviving family members has been frequently explored of late — both “In the Bedroom” and the Italian film “The Son’s Room” tell the same kind of story of sadness, bewilderment, guilt and depression. And all of these scripts at least ponder the possibility for renewal and survival.
Rapp, whose latest, far weaker play “Finer Nobler Gases” has just finished confounding and annoying audiences at the Actors Theatre of Lousiville, was propelled (into the category of hot young writer by the success of “Nocturne.” He is, by the way, the brother of Anthony Rapp, an actor known for “Rent.”
“Nocturne” does not offer an innovative structure and its later narrative complications are, for the most part, predictable. Nonetheless, this is an unsentimental, empathetic and beautifully written piece of work with a palpably lyrical sensibility and a broadly imagistic vocabulary that tends to wander around in one’s head long after the watching is over.
In the initial production, the play was performed with several actors playing the various characters who make up the narrator’s sad life. But in the Naked Eye Theatre Company’s Chicago premiere, director Jeremy B. Cohen has elected to produce the whole show with one actor. It works very well indeed.
Baker, a down-to-earth and laconic Chicago performer, has both the right sadness behind the eyes and a self-deprecating demeanor that nicely counterbalances the youthful Rapp’s occasional lyrical excesses. “Nocturne” is a fine vehicle for Baker’s considerable talents.
Cohen provides a great deal of theatrical shape and sufficient variety of pacing that this solo show is more inherently dramatic and compelling than many other productions with far bigger and far louder casts.
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“Nocturne”
When: Through May 5
Where: Storefront Theater, 66 E. Randolph St.
Phone: 312-742-8497
