STONE COLD DEAD SERIOUS
At the Chashama Theatre, 135 W. 42nd St. Through May 3. Call Smarttix, (212) 206-1515.
THERE’S an attitude among playwrights that sees the American family as so terrible, you might as well just let ’em have it.
You make fun of them until the cows come home, and then at the last minute there’s a dollop of sentimental goo for the victim of that family.
David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo,” with its New Jersey girl of 16 who has the body of a 60-year-old and a nightmarish family, is a prime example, as is Christopher Shinn’s “Four,” which rises above it through pity and poetry.
Now comes another prime example: Adam Rapp’s “Stone Cold Dead Serious” at the Chashama.
Rapp is a natural, prolific playwright whose wonderful “Nocturne” was a sober, ungimmicky study of the collapse of a family, but here he gives a lurid, supposedly but not really humorous tale of the underworld.
In “Stone Cold Dead Serious” we meet a family living in squalor somewhere in Illinois. Dad is a drooling slob who belches and watches TV; Mom brings home some Saran-wrapped food from the diner where she works and talks about the lives of the saints; Sis is a junkie prostitute who sneaks home to steal things. Ho hum.
The lone hope for the family’s brighter tomorrow is the clever son, Wynne, who is about to take a bus to New York to participate in the national finals of Tang Dynasty, a TV show where he’ll fight for his life against Asian killers for a million bucks.
Things go spectacularly awry, as you might imagine. After some macabre sexual interludes, both brother and sister end up in the hospital for endless, phony episodes.
Betsy Aidem as the mother, Guy Boyd as the father and Gretchen Cleevely as the sister adequately play caricatures of human beings under Carolyn Cantor’s direction. Offering some real feeling and humanity is Matthew Stadelmann as brother Wynne.
You get the feeling Rapp wants to be the Sam Shepard of the Illinois working class. But his gift lies elsewhere, and he’d better learn to accept it.
