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Things Being What They Are
Reviewed by Neal Weaver
The Road Theatre
Through June 21
RECOMMENDED:
Young and personable Bill (Bernie Zilinskas) works in the sales department of Seagram’s Whiskey. He has just purchased a suburban condo, and he’s waiting for the delivery of his furniture, and for his actress wife (Stephanie Erb) to join him. His unpacking is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of his next-door neighbor, Jack (Chet Grissom) — a garrulous, curious, pushy, feisty divorcée who tries with maddening persistence to persuade Bill to join him for dinner. Bill tries repeatedly to discourage his obnoxiously intrusive neighbor and send him on his way. Jack, however, has no intention of leaving. He helps himself to Bill’s beer, and airs his rather cynical views of women and marriage.
Wendy MacLeod’s play seems initially to be just a deft and engaging character comedy, with nothing much at stake. But as it progresses, she peels away the layers of her characters to reveal the troubled souls of both. Bill’s wife is unfaithful, and Jack is appalled to learn that Bill is eager to take her back. And Jack has troubles of his own: He has discovered a suspicious and probably cancerous lump in his neck and is scheduled for a biopsy in a week. He asks Bill to pick him up at the hospital after his biopsy, and Bill agrees.
As it turns out, however, the day of Jack’s surgery is also the day Bill’s wife Adele is supposed to return to him, and in his frantic preparations to receive her, he forgets about his promise. Jack arrives in high dudgeon at having been stood up and tries mightily to send Bill on a guilt trip. It soon emerges, however, that Jack is something more than an obnoxious butinsky. He’s made it his mission to challenge Bill and provoke him to stand up for himself in his uneven, one-sided relations with Adele.
MacLeod has constructed a tight comedy-drama that keeps the laughs coming even as the play deepens and becomes more complex, and director Andre Barron gives it a neat, finely calibrated production, cannily sketching the shifting tides and growing friendship between the two unlikely protagonists, as Jack slowly evolves from irascible neighbor to a thoughtful provocateur and well-wisher.
Grissom’s Jack is a mass of unexpected contradictions, mercurial, outrageous, unpredictable, funny, and ultimately touching. For much of the play he dominates the action, and Zilinskas’s Bill is endlessly befuddled by Jack’s verbal assaults and tirades until, toward the end when focus shifts, we see his own pain and perplexity.
The Road Theatre Company, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., N. Hlywd.; Thurs., 8 p.m.; Sat., 3 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through June 21. (818) 761-8838, www.RoadTheatre.org
