Few people can write a fight — a knock-down, drag-out domestic evisceration between over-articulate lovers or spouses — like Bruce Norris, a playwright who no sooner creates a loving relationship than he wants to smash its smug self to bits. And it only takes about 30 seconds of “A Parallelogram,” Norris’ latest play premiering at the Steppenwolf Theatre, for any longtime student of Norris’ suite of disrupted domestic works to sense that the unstable couple whose apartment we’re visiting is headed for the rocks.
All that stuff that Norris invariably goes after is right there, at rise: A middle-age corporate guy who has already left one wife and one set of kids. He drinks a Heineken. He watches football as a Latino guy mows his lawn. He pontificates. He’s cheap. He’s smug. He thinks white men get a raw deal. He thinks he’s sensitive and self-aware but his behavior is boorish. He’s even named Jay. And he’s played by Tom Irwin, who has those dudes down cold. With Norris putting words in his mouth, Jay has not a chance in hell.
On the bed sits his needy but wound-tight girlfriend, Bee, played by the rich and risk-loving Kate Arrington. She’s a regional manager for a drug company. She seems nice, but she is clearly restless.
Oh no, one thinks. Norris and his fearless directorial muse, Anna D. Shapiro, are going to rip the skin off these characters’ dysfunctional, self-serving bones, leaving them raw and open to every element in the cosmos.
Norris (and Shapiro) do not disappoint. But how Norris makes the cut is what makes “A Parallelogram” one of this vastly improved writer’s most compelling and, I think, personally revealing plays. Bee, you see, thinks she can see the future. An old woman (played by the iconoclastic Marylouise Burke) sits in the corner of the apartment. She appears to be Bee in the future, chatting with Bee in the present. And thus Bee can simply castrate Jay with her foreknowledge of his life. It’s like he’s been sleeping with Cassandra.
In the play’s most riveting scene, Bee tells Jay what is going to happen to him in the future: how he’ll die, how his kids won’t ever forgive him for leaving his first wife, his daughter’s contempt. That kind of thing. If you have any bit of Jay on your DNA — and, hey, I’m sensitive and I like a Heineken — it cuts to the quick. Thank God, you think, my partner does not have those kinds of weapons.
Now, as “A Parallelogram” spins on, you go back and forth on how much Bee and her version of the future (which also involves that lawn guy, played by Tim Bickel) can be trusted. You’re better experiencing that in real time, especially since the gifted designer Todd Rosenthal has created one of his signature worlds that manages to be simultaneously realistic and over-ripe. But the play remains fascinating — and ahead of its audiences — for a number of reasons.
It asks some profound existential questions: Could we stand to go on with our lives if we had specific and unchangeable foreknowledge of what’s coming down to the pike, especially the time and place of our own death? If we knew our life ultimately did more harm than good, should we kill ourselves? It wriggles out of your grasp and yet keeps its rules mostly consistent (most seeing-the-future dramas fall apart when they get into the dramaturgically thorny business of people changing the future). To its great credit, this play manages to be about time travel and yet not really about time travel — the future is deftly kept at bay, so to speak. And “A Parallelogram” manages to differentiate itself from others in its genre by eschewing sentiment. In Hollywood movies, time-travelers invariably use the future to solve present-day problems; Norris mostly uses the future as scalpel.
It’s like Norris has combined the alacrity of Edward Albee, the nebbish intellectualism of Wallace Shawn and some of the narrative questions of “Back to the Future.” It makes your head spin in all the right ways.
I would not claim every moment tracked. Norris pokes internal fun at time-machines (“Why would you need a machine to travel to the future?” Bee asks, rhetorically. “You’re already going to the future.”). And yet Norris’ Future Bee brandishes a little remote-control zapper-thingee that seems a rather unimaginative way, to say the least, of moving the clock. There’s also a confusing section where Norris solves a tricky problem by suddenly making Bee’s future-seeing abilities conditional — yet you really can’t have your future cake and eat it, if you know what I mean.
The play also gets muddy around Bee’s belated interest in Jay’s kids, which feels false. And I found a dark speech about the horrors of parenting to be a gratuitous inclusion of a familiar Norris trope involving children. The Bee that he and Arrington have created just would not think that way.
Yet I also think “A Parallelogram” is one of Norris’ most compassionate plays, directed with Shapiro’s usual uncompromising drive but also allowed to breathe a little. You can see Norris’ usual fury at characters who go through life apparently without the need for self-examination (that would be Jay here) and his use of counterbalancing characters who simply can’t resist blowing up a happy night by, say, suddenly asking an awkward question and retreating into their own neuroses as if they don’t deserve to be happy and thus need to kill the possibility (that would be Bee).
This time, though, Norris doesn’t wholly pour out all his affection onto the Cassandra in the room (which is, of course, Norris himself) and merely rail against those of us who get by to get by on most of life’s weightier questions. This play raises the logical possibility that this may, in fact, be the way to go. I’ve long thought I could spot the character spouting the Norris worldview easily in his plays — this time I was not so sure. Norris, who is clearly in his creative prime, seems to be opening up to the fact that there is a bit of Irwin’s complex Jay in Norris’ DNA. And thus, as smart and uncompromising as the play is, it is never smug nor, thank God, wholly certain of either its present or its future.
When: Through Aug. 29
Where: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Tickets: $20-$70 at 312-335-1650 or steppenwolf.org
