You think you know your significant other, don’t you? Well, hah! I say. There’s a reason we call them “other.” Everybody’s got secrets, and some are whoppers. Even if you marry for love, you marry a stranger.
One problem with Belleville is precisely that we know something is wrong so early on—i.e., well before Herzog seems ready to acknowledge it. She plays by the familiar rules of the form, gamely dropping hints designed to ramp up our unease, even to the extent of placing a great, big, glittering kitchen knife in easy reach. But Anne Kauffman’s staging tends to make us aware of the hints without actually making us tense about them. The show sometimes suggests an academic exercise: Can this genre be revived? As an audience member, I hope the answer is yes—the intimate-enemy conceit is just too juicy to abandon, especially in times like these, when social media have rendered our identities so fungible. The desire for mystery is undermined here, however, by an acute awareness of mystery’s mechanics. That may be one reason why some of Belleville‘s middle scenes tend to drag: once we know we’ve been set up, much of what goes on between Zack and Abby feels like stalling.
Through 8/25: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM, matinee Wed 8/7-8/21, 2 PM
Steppenwolf Theatre
1650 N. Halsted
312-335-1650
steppenwolf.org
$20-$78
