The company known as Prop Thtr has taken over adjoining spaces on North Elston Avenue, formerly home to an Austrian gift shop and a fastener warehouse. Sad to think of all those figurines and fasteners out on the street, but there you have it.
Prop’s renovations remain in progress. When completed, the 23-year-old company will have a pair of handsome rectangular brick-walled playrooms — a larger primary space, and a 49-seat studio space opening next month, though at the moment it’s actually the more finished of the two — to call its own.
For its inaugural mainstage run, alas, Prop has backed what charitably might be called “the wrong pony.” One can see why Peter Mellencamp’s “Struggling Truths,” a coy historical fable peripherally about the Dalai Lama, might entice smart people to bet on it. No stiff-backed historical drama, it’s a brash, episodic and largely comic venture, spanning many years across the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s in the life of Tibet.
Its central story is that of a separated brother and sister, one symbolizing Tibetan Buddhism, the other Chinese Communism. Its narrator is Sansang, a wisenheimer Buddhist guru who dies and returns, in Act 2, as a Communist sympathizer. He’s a one-man lesson in the yin/yang duality.
If that sounds like a crowded track, it is. Mellencamp blends real-life figures like the Dalai Lama (Gordon Chow, effectively searching) and Chairman Mao (Whit Spurgeon) along with Mellencamp’s inventions: Dorje (earnest Jason Llamas), the farmer who becomes a resistance fighter, and his sister Rinchen (plaintive Helen Young), who falls in with the Red Chinese.
The Prop production, staged by Scott Vehill, does well enough by the careering text. Prop’s executive director, Jonathan Lavan, has fun as Sangsang, though his approach glibs up a role that’s plenty glib to begin with.
The play, finally, never locates a provocative mixture of seriousness and funniness. Unruly, bloody recent Tibetan history deserves a more stimulatingly unruly play than this.
“Struggling Truths”
When: Through March 28
Where: Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $20-$22 773-486-7767
