Superior Donuts Steppenwolf Theatre
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Good advice: don’t worry about writing another masterpiece, just write something. And it looks like Letts took it. Coming down off the exertion of creating a three-hour, O’Neillian knock-down-drag-out like August: Osage County—knowing he’d added a major piece of work to his credits, even if the Pulitzer committee hadn’t yet found out at that point—he just started writing something. And Superior Donuts is the result: a serviceable and often touching comedy with assets of its own.
In Man From Nebraska, 57-year-old Ken Carpenter suffers a sudden crisis of faith and decides to explore the world beyond the plains. The flamboyantly troubled women of August: Osage County get all the attention, but it’s the absence of patriarch Bev Weston (who in many ways checked out long before he went missing) that throws their anguish into sharp relief. In Superior Donuts we’ve got Arthur Przybyszewski, an ineffectual former hippie who runs the Uptown donut shop his Polish immigrant parents opened in 1950. Arthur’s a decent but passive person who’s managed to dodge responsibility most of his life. Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts are making businesses like his obsolete, and Arthur himself is similarly outmoded, with his graying ponytail and nostalgia for the Chicago of his youth—a working-class city full of distinctive neighborhoods.
Tina Landau’s production for Steppenwolf derives a crucial sense of authenticity from set designer Loy Arcenas’s realistic evocation of a Chicago storefront business and Ana Kuzmanic’s regular-folks costumes. Arthur’s played by Michael McKean, the former Laverne & Shirley regular, best known now for his roles in mockumentaries directed by Christopher Guest, including Best in Show and For Your Consideration. He has good timing and conveys Arthur’s exhaustion convincingly, but his performance is also pallid at times, failing to command attention.
