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Ambition Facing West
By Anthony Clarvoe
Directed by D.B. Schroeder
Produced by Thunder & Lightning Ensemble
At City Lit Theatre
1020 W. Bryn Mawr
Chicago, IL
Thursday, Fridays & Saturdays at 7:30 PM
Running time is 2 hours, 10 minutes with intermission
Through June 24, 2006
Ambition Facing West too ambitious for fledging theatre troupe.
The new theatrical troupe, Thunder & Lightning Ensemble, selected a Chicago premiere work by Anthony Clarvoe, Ambition Facing West. This over written, confusing work tries much too hard as does the ensemble to create a show about the immigrant experience. Clarvoe tries to simultaneously to weave his family saga in 1910 Croatia, in 1940’s Wyoming and in 1980’s Japan. The story traces the movement of a boy (Ian Forrester) from Croatia who yearns to migrate to America in 1910 after a priest (Sean Bolger) opens his imagination when he teaches the boy to read. We see his nasty, controlling mother (actually all the mothers in this play are cruel, dominating women trying to cling to their sons) try in vain to keep the boy in Europe.
Move to Wyoming (for some unexplained reason) during World War II and we see the Croatian boy grown into a union organizer with a doting daughter who waits on her nasty, verbally abusive mother. The girl turns down Stanford University to chase her boy friend to Texas.
Add the daughter in 1980’s Japan with an unmotivated game-playing son who debates everything with his mother and we have three plays all trying for our attention. Filled with author-speak dialogue and terrible Croatian and Italian accents, this play drags on until it self-destructs under its own weight.
Playwright Anthony Clarvoe’s canvas is stretched much too thin as he weaves three generations through the immigrant experience. He tries to cover too many ideas and peoples his play with unlikable mothers and implausible circumstances. He can’t decide what to focus on so he scatters from era to era that results in a talky confusing work. The acting was stilted, with most of the actors spouting lines in an amateurish manner. Ed Schultz, as Stipan, sounded like he rehearsed only a few times as butchered his lines throughout. Add many flubbed by lines by others and poorly timed pauses and shouting to indicate emotion and the play screams community theatre at its lowest level.
Ambition Facing West, at best a troubled script, is much too difficult for a newbie theatre group to tackle.
Not Recommended
Tom Williams
Tom99@chicagocritic.com for comments
Talk Theatre in Chicago podcast
Date Reviewed: June 10, 2006
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