The Jacksonian
Written by Beth Henley
Profiles Theatre, 4139 N. Broadway (map)
thru Oct 11 | tix: $30-$40 | more info
Check for half-price tickets
Entertaining but messy Midwest premiere
Profiles Theatre presents
The Jacksonian
Review by Clint May
It was a night of debuts. Not only is this the Midwest premiere of Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian, but so too were all the cast members new to Profiles. This is a stage with a love affair for the pulpy and the seedy. From A Behanding in Spokane to In God’s Hat to now The Jacksonian, they should consider just having a run-down hotel set on standby. The Jacksonian revisits Henley’s fascination with the tropes of Southern dysfunction that made her famous when Crimes of the Heart won the Pulitzer in 1981. There’s big hair, big accents and big drama to be had in the faded glory of this transient place. Henley has cranked the absurdity of her characters to 11. This is Tennessee Williams and Stephen King playing Clue at midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Bill has been staying at The Jacksonian in exile from his marriage to wife Susan (Rachel Sledd), a high-strung woman who may or may not be a little off kilter. Given that we are told early on that “everyone lies,” we cannot be assured that Rosy is a reliable narrator of events. Certainly everyone is lying to themselves.
Working at the hotel are a couple of dime-store dummies—bartender Fred (Christian Isely) and his floozy gold-diggin’ waitress-of-a-girlfriend Eva (Betsy Bowman). They robbed a gas station and killed the attendant with the hopes of getting away and pinning the blame on an old black man. Rosy is frequently left on her own with these two lowlifes as her parents “work through” their marriage crisis. She’s young and homely but no dummy, seeing preternaturally through Fred’s transparent attempts at getting away from Eva while simultaneously seducing her.
The year is 1964 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act has thrown the South’s identity of white superiority into an apoplectic fit of reactionism. Henley’s characters are similarly trying to maintain outer identities that don’t or can’t match interiors. Eva attaches herself unironically to her religion and the idea of bridedom while publicly supporting the KKK. Bill has lost all sense of himself without his family and the loss of his practice. Susan doesn’t know how to define herself as a woman after a hysterectomy. Rosy just wants her family—however dysfunctional—back together again so she can go back to being a teenager. Everyone seems to be mirroring the larger crisis except for Fred himself. As a pure sociopath, he is horrifically capable of adapting to survive free of dissonance. As a place,The Jacksonian then becomes a Sartrean hellscape designed and dispatched for one tenant who is the South. Katie-Bell Springmann’s ingenious two-level set and Michael Rathbun’s lighting (I enjoyed the detail of the ice machine’s interior light changing color to reflect mood) combine to reinforce this surreal aspect.
Why it doesn’t all come together to create something dreadfully wonderful to behold—well, it’s difficult to pin down. Henley plays with so many kinds of tones that just 90 minutes feels like too little to build the necessary world. Pigeonholing this into any particular genre (this is often called ‘Southern Gothic’) would do a disservice to this type of genre-spanning attempt.
At times the cast must play straight naturalism or go for a type of character that feels forced to serve the needs of the plot. Nonetheless, the cast is uniformly good, and Curtis certainly creates a fascinating character out of his oral-obsessed-daddy-issues-escaping-wife-beating-nitrous-sucking dentist. Liscio is fresh out of high school and already a compelling stage presence. I could have done without Rosy’s Greek-tragedian style narration as I typically find such a device in this context unnecessary, but she’s perfectly old beyond her years and manages to sell a character’s eerie prescience which seems to belong to a different story.
This got great reviews when it debuted Off-Broadway in 2013, starring Ed Harris, Glenne Headly, Amy Madigan and Bill Pullman and Juliet Brett. It’s not that Director Joe Jahraus’ attempt isn’t entertaining, there’s just some kind of ineffable something missing that might have sparked this to bigger heights. The non-linear conceit doesn’t quite land the emotional punch it wants, a few parts come off as cheesy, and the pacing around the climax is rushed. Part of this is just surprise that such a tailor-made-for-Profiles type of show isn’t great and it might be true that I wouldn’t put this onus on another theater company with different expectations.
Rating: ★★½
The Jacksonian continues through October 11th at Profile’s Main Stage, 4139 N. Broadway (map), with performances Thursdays and Fridays 8pm, Saturdays 5pm and 8pm, Sundays 7pm. Tickets are $30-$40, and are available by phone (773-549-1815) or online through PrintTixUSA.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at ProfilesTheatre.org. (Running time: 90 minutes without intermission)
Photos by Michael Brosilow
artists
cast
Betsy Bowman (Eva), Tim Curtis (Bill Perch), Christian Isely (Fred), Juliana Liscio (Rosy Perch), Rachel Sledd (Susan)
behind the scenes
Joe Jahraus (director), Katie-Bell Springmann (set design), Michael Rathbun (light design), Oliver Hickman (sound design and original music), Raquel Adorno (costume design), Jeff Gamlin (assistant director), Miles Mabry (stage manager), Michael Brosilow (photos)
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