First up is a press conference. A table and chair have been set out onstage. A man walks on wearing a baseball cap over casual business attire: shirt, slacks, striped tie, blazer. We hear camera shutters click. He takes his place at the table, says, “All right, everybody, let’s just get going.”
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But then he veers off script and into reverie. I think the break comes when he talks about the new team strategy, saying the idea was to “betray that which had become merely habit . . . the thing that says to us: don’t cross the street without looking both ways first; don’t speak your mind and certainly never your heart.” Because from that moment on the coach speaks queasily and comically from his heart, bemoaning lost love, reciting original poetry (“Rosemary, for remembrance; / Glucosamine and chondroitin for the joints”), and generally fessing up to the disaster that is his life. At one point he recalls staring at his reflection in a grocery-store freezer and telling himself, “You’re not having a bad day—this is just what you look like now.”
The four other short plays in Will Eno‘s collection Oh, the Humanity! (and Other Exclamations) run along similar lines: somebody gets into a situation that demands a certain type of public persona, somebody can’t maintain that persona, and the despairing, amusing underpinnings of things get exposed. In “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rain,” a man and woman dissolve into honest uncertainty as each tries to record a perky video for a dating service. In “Enter the Spokeswoman, Gently,” an airline rep dissolves into uncertain honesty as she attempts to inform and console the relatives of people who’ve just died in a plane crash. “The Bully Composition” has a photographer’s assistant bringing unwanted intimations of mortality to her boss’s shoot. And the title exclamation, “Oh, the Humanity,” plays on the strategic self-delusion that makes it possible for actors to act.
Through 8/12: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Gift Theatre Company, 4802 N. Milwaukee, 773-283-7071, thegifttheatre.org, $20-$30.
