The world of Chicago writer Joe Meno is strange and often enchanting. Best known for his short stories and novels, Meno has written a play, Star Witness, that’s getting a likable first production from the House Theatre of Chicago (which also staged his The Boy Detective Fails in 2006). But neither Meno nor director Sean Graney has figured out how to unleash all the fascinating weirdness the script has to offer. In fact, they’ve managed to set loose exactly half of it.
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A young girl named Jamie Fay has gone missing from the small southern-Illinois town of Somerset, leaving only a pair of bloody pink sneakers behind. Shelley, a 19-year-old dreamer with a crummy waitressing job, jumps on her Schwinn Sting-Ray (also pink) and pedals madly into the night, hoping to find Jamie Fay even though a swarm of police has come up with nothing. She puts an eight-by-ten photo of the child in the bicycle’s front basket, as though the image itself could summon her from the darkness.
Next Shelley encounters Junior, a motel night clerk moonlighting as a tourist photo opportunity: He’s dressed as the monster that supposedly lurks in Somerset’s Green Lake. Junior has invented “a whole new way to kiss,” he boasts, and waxes ecstatic about the “most beautiful thing” he’s ever seen—a mother, father, and toddler sleeping together naked in a bed at his motel.
Nothing coheres in the first act partly because Graney plays it so straight. He renders everything in conventionally realistic terms—including unmistakable upswells of weirdness such as Hazel telling a fairy tale directly to the audience, whom she addresses as “boys and girls.” Maybe if Graney and Meno were to transplant act one into the dreamscape of act two, it would all make satisfying, illogical sense.
