Chicago Shakespeare Theater is billing its world-premiere comedy, “Fault,” as “wickedly funny.” A more accurate description would be “unaccountably nasty.”
Scooter Pietsch’s three-character, single-set show begins with a married lawyer, Lucy (Rebecca Spence), aggressively bonking a much younger guy, Shaun (Nick Marini) on the floor of her fancy New York apartment. In flagrante delicto, enters Lucy’s obnoxious husband, Jerry (Enrico Colantoni), a besuited but nonetheless cro-magnon finance dude who has just closed on an epic deal, netting him billions of dollars. But, self-evidently, not his wife.
Jerry is not exactly delighted with what he interrupts, but his response is not so much pique or sadness as unmitigated aggression, even to the point of chasing Nick around the apartment with a sword or two from his Anglophile collection. Before long, said young philanderer, who thought he was engaged in a harmless one-night stand, finds himself trapped, embroiled and compromised by this rich, bored couple’s sex-and-power games, conscripted as a kind of bribed-and-tied judge as they go back over who helped whom, and who did what to whom, during their shared rise in American business. This Lucy and Gerry make Edward Albee’s George and Martha look like a priest and a nun.
About 15 minutes into the antics of this most loathsome trio — talk about a play with no one to like — I started staring down at the program in the hope that we might at least be seeing another character with the potential to relieve us from this trio. Alas, no such blam is forthcoming. And thus the audience is stuck with this scenario, which complicates in intensity and with a linguistic relish that has its funny moments (for some, anyway), but also features a lot of crudity that really wrenches you away from the typical landscape of the classy, urban American farce. Very little offends me in a moral sense in the theater, but parts of this script came close.
Some clever physical business notwithstanding, the compounding problem with director Jason Alexander’s production is a wildly over-the-top performance from Colantoni, whose endlessly yammering Jerry rampages around Paul Tate dePoo III’s set, often armed with something sharp and always filled with so much rhetorical bile as to make the listener eye the exits. He put me in mind of the famous Broadway story involving the play “I Hate Hamlet” and the sword-wielding actor Nicol Williamson.
Both Spence and Marini are much better and funnier than that, thankfully, and the all-in Spence’s Lucy does have some moments where this fine actress lends so much to this bizarrely written character that you actually start to believe this could be a real person who willingly married this most dangerous of men. But that does not really last.
Neither, I suspect, will this play.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Fault” (2 stars)
When: Through May 24
Where: The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $60-$126 at 312-595-5600 and chicagoshakes.com
