As its daring title might suggest, “Ugly Lies the Bone” is a tough watch. The current production from Shattered Globe Theatre at Theater Wit, which opened Thursday night, is about a severely wounded veteran of the war in Afghanistan and her attempts at rehabilitation and to return to, for want of a better word, normalcy.
To a large extent, Lindsey Ferrentino’s play, now directed in Chicago by Jonathan Berry, is about the definition and management of pain. This topic is, of course, not something one typically thinks about until it arrives in one’s own consciousness. We can’t really know someone else’s level of agony, which is why the medical profession has come up with pain scales, the 1-10 range that acknowledges that human tolerance varies and that no single person really knows how another feels.
In this piece, combat veteran Jess (Christina Gorman) has a body wracked with trauma; the script requires the physical depiction thereof, no small challenge for makeup designer Hannah Andrus and costumer Kotryna Hilko. In terms of the action of the play, we watch Jess try to rebuild old relationships with her sister Kacie (Cyd Blakewell), her sister’s new boyfriend Kelvin (Eddie Martinez) and Stevie (Christopher Acevedo), an old flame of Jess’s herself. Between those scenes, we see Jess in rehab with her therapist (Barbara Figgins), depicted only by a voice. Among the techniques employed is a virtual reality headset. By placing herself in a fictional environment, a woman for whom any kind of physical movement is agonizing can see small movements amplified, allowing her to stride through space and time with self-actualizing and soothing confidence.
In 2014, when I first encountered “Ugly Lies the Bone” as it was being developed at the Eugene O’Neill Center, virtual reality headsets were new and their projection in the theater a surprise. But there’s a danger with plays that prominently feature nascent technology. The headsets now are very familiar, of course, and what I’d call our growing distrust of simulacra of all kinds to some degree undermines the point that Ferrentino was making.
Another issue, especially in this production, is the use of that disembodied voice. Microphones often tempt actors toward bravura verbosity and when they are paired with actors without them, the effect can be disorienting; plus, there is something about this kind of anonymous, amplified sound that conveys hostility (“A Chorus Line” being one example). The writer’s intention, I think, was to put the focus firmly on Jess, but the scenes seem a little off, to be honest, as if Jess were in some kind of torture chamber. One fears for her all the time, and that impacts the forward movement of the play.
Jess is a very challenging role and Gorman certainly has mastered her character’s present reality, no small feat. But to my mind she needs more focus on her character’s former self. In general, Berry’s production struggles some with the conversational reality of the domestic scenes, a crucial sharp contrast with the rehab sections. It’s not easy to believe that Jess and Stevie were once together, for example, or to really envision the prior relationship of the sisters. I can’t overstate how hard this is to pull off in this play. These are very capable actors giving their all, but here you have a production that needs to step back a little from the intense angst at its center and find more of the contrasting humor and humanity, which is equally important. Symbolically and literally, the show needs to breathe.
One final note: Berry, the director, has returned to Chicago after a long stint away. His return surely will be a great positive for Chicago theater; he’s known for fearless, actor-centered productions of precisely this kind of play. I look forward to more.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Ugly Lies the Bone” (2.5 stars)
When: Through Oct. 31
Where: Shattered Globe at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes
Tickets: $20-$60 at 773-975-8150 and theaterwit.org
