I’m generally not a huge fan of material wherein creative folk in any discipline—theater, film, publishing, music—turn to their own profession for inspiration. If a movie is about filmmaking, or a novel is about a tortured novelist, or a singer crows about how hard life is on the road, I check out pretty quickly. So I was quite pleased and surprised by how relentlessly the genuine laughs flowed in Saint Sebastian Players’s mounting of Terrence McNally’s It’s Only a Play and how engaging the story ultimately was.
It’s Only a Play
Through 5/21: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Saint Bonaventure, 1625 W. Diversey, 773-404-7922, saintsebastianplayers.org, $30 (seniors, students, and children under 12 $25)
Centering on a group of theater folks directly and tangentially involved with the opening night of the long-awaited drama The Golden Egg as they wait for “the reviews”—meaning the New York Times review—to come in, It’s Only a Play presents some hard-bitten folks ultimately questioning why they’ve masochistically ridden the show business roller coaster for so many years.
The script too often falls back on name-dropping for comic effect, and sometimes it feels like none of the characters are edging toward a specific story beat, but Robert-Eric West’s direction makes up for it by keeping things going at a fast clip. Melinda “MJ” Deamon is a hoot as hot-mess actress Virginia Noyes. Danne W. Taylor as disgruntled critic Ira Drew and Valerie Gerlock (a favorite of mine in Saint Sebastian’s Boeing-Boeing last fall) as producer Julia Budder also stood out. Nat Kier comes close to stealing the show as kleptomaniac Frank Finger when, pants pulled down, he stands on a bed filled with coats and recites a demented monologue about his impostor syndrome.