By Venus Zarris

I understand that theater is a collaborative effort. Some decisions are made by committee and some are individual calls. Whoever the buck falls on for choosing this script needs to take a long hard look at their evaluation filters as Rhymes With Evil plays more like an exercise in combining clichés, rather than an actualized play.

I went to the show with a friend who, like myself, possesses a love for puppets and eerie subject matter. The beautifully atmospheric press photos and poster/card designs added to our heightened anticipation. The detailed set design is disturbingly cluttered with dolls, puppets and toys. Seemingly every nook and cranny, and there are a lot of them, are filled with inanimate faces that range from the darling to the grotesque.

The lights dimmed to darkness and Miles Polaski’s perfectly haunting original composition filled the room. The music was wonderful. We settled in for something good.

What followed was a combination of Robin Williams’ characters, disingenuous soap opera melodrama, recycled B-horror film plot devices and sophomoric Punch and Judy antics.

Rhymes With Evil tells the story of a couple on the verge of divorce. The husband is an eccentric ex-schoolteacher, dismissed for his unconventional approach. The wife owns a boutique. She returns home after a trip to New York, ready to tell him of her decision to end the relationship but he is in denial about a lot of things, the divorce being the least of their problems.

Technically this is a strong show. There’s a lot going on and it all runs smoothly. The cast is solid, although their abilities are hard to glean since the material they are working with is laughably contrived and the characters they are playing are mostly one-dimensional.

Andy Luther plays Lathan, the husband that is descending into madness. The character starts out as a Mrs. Doubtfire and then moves on to several of Robin Williams’ other annoyingly over-the-top film roles; ending with a more sinister incarnation but it is ALL Robin Williams, thereby making it ALL forced and unbelievable. Luther is a gifted actor, just recently delivering an excellent performance in Nothlight Theatre’s production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, but watching him in this part is cringe inducing. Not for his performance, but rather for what he is asked to perform. Good actors in bad parts makes you just feel sad for the wasted talent and effort.

Victoria Gilbert plays wife Sara in another example waste. Even the finest actor can’t convince us of the attraction she has for her husband, who should have been Baker Acted years before for his insanity or at the very least left for the sake of the wife’s self-preservation. The other actors make good stabs at there characters but the dialogue is flat and artificial. The degree of melodrama is oftentimes unintentionally laugh-out-loud funny.

It is as if playwright Charles R. Traeger took a few obvious plot ideas, typed them into a search engine, added the word cliché, pressed enter and then wrote the script from what came up on the first page.

The end of the play tumbles into manufactured chaos. There’s a shooting with no blood. (I’m sorry but if the victim doesn’t go down for good after being shot then there needs to be evidence of an entry wound or AT LEAST the leg that is being favored need to stay the same.) And then we suffer through glimpses of every possible outcome in one of the most dragged out, cant-make-up-your-mind endings I have ever seen. We watch every draft of the ending played out to prolonged and excruciating effect.

Maybe he’ll come to his senses? Maybe he’ll kill his wife? Maybe he’ll let her go? Maybe she’ll get away? Maybe he’ll kill himself? Maybe he’ll kill them both? Maybe she’ll kill him? Maybe help will come in time? The only thing for certain is that we don’t care because, and here’s a tip for suspense writers in any medium, indecision on the part of the psychopath DOES NOT create tension.

Rhymes With Evil is an example of a production with great potential squandered on script with little to offer.

1 STAR

(“Rhymes With Evil” runs through November 8 at the Storefront Theater, 66 E. Randolph St. 312-742-8497.)

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DCA Theater - Chicago Dept. of Cultural Affairs

Rhymes With Evil production photos by John W. Sisson, Jr.

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