Dental Society Midwinter Meeting

Reviewed by Bill Raden
Buzzworks at Atwater Village Theatre
Through July 17

Photo by Craig Anton

There are few tropes in comedy as time-tested or foolproof as dentistry. W.C. Fields’s portrait of cupidity and professional incompetence in his classic of two-reel slapstick, The Dentist, neatly sums it up: A dentist is, in Fields’s terms, the doctor that is not quite a doctor — an ethically suspect practitioner of something less than medicine for reasons that fall far short of anything recognizably altruistic.

And if one dentist is reflexively funny, or so goes the implicit logic in Chicago playwright Laura Jacqmin’s satiric treatment of a regional dental convention, then a show about 6,000 of them packed into a Skokie Marriott should be the occasion for tectonic laughter.

It is not. Despite the best efforts of an otherwise appealing, six-person ensemble, Jacqmin’s overly insistent, under-focused and occasionally logorrheic collection of sketches barely raises a titter during its 75 intermission-less minutes.

Why Dental Society Midwinter Meeting fails so abjectly probably has less to do with the limits of satire or the miscalculated antics of director Craig Anton’s staging than it does with Jacqmin’s fatal weakness for telling rather than showing.

The evening is long on choral monologues that editorialize (rather than dramatize) the ethical crisis facing this year’s meeting — namely that the Society’s charismatic president, Morris J. Morris, Jr. (Davey Johnson) has allowed his mistress/hygienist (Sharmila Devar) to perform “advanced dental procedures” without a license.

And while the play repeatedly says that the scandal threatens to imbue what has been little more than a glorified trade show with unexpected and unwelcome significance, that deeper dialogue about the precariousness of prestige and privilege never quite materializes.

The closest that Jacqmin gets to something poignantly human and emblematically ironic comes in an after-hours scene between actors Brad David Reed and Jon Gentry. Reed plays an emotionally frail gay dentist recently broken up with his life and business partner following the latter’s criminal indictment for insurance fraud. He has brought the apparently willing Gentry back to his hotel room in a painfully tentative sexual come-on that abruptly pivots when Gentry reveals that he, too, has been defrauding his patients and merely wants legal advice on how to avoid prison.

Had Jacqmin extended that exploration of brittle vulnerability lurking under professional veneer to the rest of the play, she might have produced a Dental Perversity in Chicago rather than the wan collection of clichés that she retreads here.

Atwater Village Theater, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through July 17. Buzzworks.org