“What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry uplike a raisin in the sun?
Lord knows our current economic crisis festers and stinks, so conditions on the ground are ripe for a revival—and the indispensable Amy Morton has directed a thoroughly engaging one for Steppenwolf.
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Her Teach, the would-be cat burglar who can’t keep track of his own hat, is played with flawless elan by Tracy Letts, the most significant playwright to come out of Chicago since Mamet. In Letts’s August: Osage County, Barbara Weston (originally played by Morton) quotes Beverly, her dead father, saying, “This country was always pretty much a whorehouse, but at least it used to have some promise. Now it’s just a shithole.” If Mamet’s scabrous portrait of lowlifes with delusions of adequacy can be taken as a metaphor for the general state of things, Beverly was generous in his assessment of the past. It’s hard to imagine Teach or his partners in crime, Donny and Bobby, succeeding at anything even with all the breaks on their side. That’s both the source of the best humor in Mamet’s often riotously funny script and also its biggest challenge: How do you get an audience to invest in characters so obviously in over their heads from the get-go?
Rail-thin and pale as a sheet, Andrews looks like he could snap in two, and his nasal, flat line readings beautifully convey a kid who lives in constant fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Morton has a strong handle on the physical and verbal dynamics the play requires. I particularly admired her choice to keep the characters from physically touching one another until near the climax. Instead, they circle and eye one another like feral dogs, occasionally barking out their hard-won but idiotic aphorisms on success, failure, and friendship.
