History: Reviews

As a rule, Beau O'Reilly is a master of exquisite detail, a playwright with a golden ear for naturalistic dialogue. But he's also a man of surprises, and in his latest full-length work—a grim, haunting portrait of a pair of hard-livin', heavy-drinkin' vagrants—he also uses broad, sweeping strokes to convey his take on the Great Depression. O'Reilly remains astonishingly adept at painting pictures with words, but what distinguishes Whiskey in Blue is its emphasis on tone, established in many of his earlier works through the natural rhythms of dialogue. But dialogue is at a premium here, since words are more precious to these characters than either food or whiskey.

O'Reilly's approach also seems a bit more organic than usual: in a canny move, he's left it up to his cast of four to fill in the details and add the color to his skeletal work. Kat McJimsey crosses gender lines convincingly as the crippled yet eternally optimistic Farmboy, while Paul Leisen offers a more muted performance as the strong-armed guardian Tommy O. But both draw on unusually extensive emotional palettes....

With its tiny storefront theater, its disdain for commercial appeal and its eclectic performance sensibility, the venerable Curious Theatre Branch is an urban kind of endeavor. Had fringe stalwart Beau O'Reilly been plying his counter-cultural trade in downtown New York for the past 14 years instead of on Lincoln Avenue, he'd have been the subject of theses and dissertations comparing his work to such potential peers as the Wooster Group or Mabou Mines.

But whenever O'Reilly, a loyal Chicagoan, has penned full-length plays at various points over the last decade, he's typically evoked the most isolated and rural of environments and populated them with ill-educated characters in the most depressing of circumstances.

Whiskey in Blue, which is being remounted at the Storefront Theater in the Loop, is a typical member of the O'Reilly oeuvre.

It's set during the Depression in a dustbowl town "where the dirt was dirty and the wind blew mournful all day." Androgynous characters with names like Tommy O, Farmboy and Fingers hang around an abandoned boxcar alternately abusing, terrifying and redeeming each other. And on a ledge above the main performance space, live musicians play mournful folk.

If that weren't enough thematic heft, the action in the play is shot through with violence and themes of revenge. One of the immobile central characters has two broken legs (recalling Beckett's Ham), but that doesn't stop his colleague from swinging him around the stage to the accompaniment of blood-curdling screams.

Thanks to O'Reilly's remarkable gifts with soaring, resonant language, and a quartet of typically intense and enigmatic Curious actors—Paul Leisen, Kat McJimsey, Kathleen Powers and Colm O'Reilly—Whiskey in Blue is a fascinating, superbly performed piece of theater with swirling, guttural themes of Midwestern pain and isolation.