Even though his best plays undoubtedly lie in his future, Brett Neveu already lays claim to the title of Chicago’s most promising young playwright. And there are a couple of intensely exciting things about “4 Murders,” Neveu’s sparse but highly arresting latest work, currently premiering in Old Town with the help of some superb acting at A Red Orchid Theatre.
“4 Murders” bespeaks of a talented writer who now is finding a coherent and distinctive voice. And it’s a play indisputably at one with the dramatic traditions and the peculiar human rhythms of the city Neveu calls home. Despite no references to a specific place, “4 Murders” is a darn good Chicago play. And like all the best Chicago literature, it deftly captures the Chicago paradox.
The characters — even the murderer whose quartet of violent crimes form the heart of the simply staged work — are warm and friendly. Yet all are suffused with urban isolation. The milieu is the Chicago neighborhood, the not-quite-gentrified neighborhood, where crime co-exists with $400,000 condos, ugly hard graft with appealing green trees, angry middle-age white men with trusting middle-age women. And where CTA buses don’t come like they should.
Many of us live — or have lived — in such a neighborhood here, and we recognize such a sophisticated picture when we see it.
The violent core of this new play has the desired impact. Bart Ross, the quiet murderer of Michael F. Lefkow and Donna Grace Humphrey, kept leaping into my mind. That shocking recent case certainly suggests that the central sweet-but-murderous character of Joel — performed with brilliant introspection by Lawrence MacGowan — has verisimilitude.
And his four victims — Wendi Weber’s lonely, tea-sipping apartment dweller, Kirsten Fitzgerald’s droll, hard-toiling factory worker, Douglas Vickers’ cynically intelligent SRO loser, Cecil Burroughs’ effusively friendly office worker — all ring just as true.
“4 Murders” is not a perfect piece. One of the problems with the title — and the structure — is that once you’ve seen a couple of the murders, you tend to sit back and wait for the other two on the road map you’ve been given. Neveu tries to shake things up a little, but you want him to jolt the rules and surprise us far more. You can also detect a certain authorial resistance to getting to the dramatic heart of the scene — Neveu writes compelling dialogue, but he can wait too long to let the audacious things happen.
With the help of a simple but immensely evocative set from Geoffrey M. Curley, Guy Van Swearingen’s premiere production powerfully feeds the images of the script. I’d argue that Vickers’ performance is allowed to get too broad — a mismatch with the rest of the highly truthful cast — but otherwise, Van Swearingen has found precisely the right actors. The creepy MacGowan offers one of the best performances of the year so far.
There’s only one major problem in the production. The murders are done in such a stylized way that they seem to maybe not be murders at all. That’s a mistake. In the script, Neveu refers to killings and people dying.
Indeed, the mismatch between the prosaic chatter of everyday life and the real danger of attack — in Chicago, for goodness’ sake, in the here and now — is the whole point of this immensely powerful new play.
———-
“4 Murders”
When: Through June 5
Where: A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells St., Chicago
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $14-$20 at 312-943-8722
