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Smart
By Robert Fieldsteel
Produced by The Side Project Theatre
1439 W. Jarvis St.
Chicago, IL
Tickets: 773-973-2150 or www.thesideproject.net , $15 (2-for-1Thurs)
Thursdays thru Saturdays at 8:00 pm, Sundays at 3:00 pm
Running time is 2 hours 15 minutes with one intermission
Through December 16th
Dartmouth College Murders Recounted in Smart
Robert Fieldsteel’s Smart, which is now in its world premiere at the Side Project Theatre, is a psychological drama based on the 2001 murders of two Dartmouth professors by a couple of local high school boys. The murders were senseless and incredibly unplanned. In this smartly staged, fictionalized account the boys’ lack of direction is a metaphor for examining the aimlessness of the larger society. Joel Vining stars as Raymond Clay, the philosophizing mastermind of the murders; Ricardo Gamboa is his follower and pal, Stan Ferguson.
Director Adam Webster makes maximum use of the tiny Side Project space, leaving all of his actors on stage all of the time while using lights to shift scenes from the prisons where the killers are separately housed to the dorm room of sociology major Doug Fisk (Evan Linder) and girlfriend Cathy Sullivan (Kristen Secrist), to the home of Sarah and Gregory Zorn (J Kingsford Goode, Steve Radcliffe), the scene of the victims’ brutal stabbing. I saw this show on its first evening of previews and there were still a couple of kinks to work out, but the rapid scene shifts moved the story along at a strong clip and I found the total effect both realistic and engaging.
For those who might be a bit squeamish about real knives – serrated navy-seal issue – in such an up-close space, the end-of-Act-One murders may be a tad unsettling. Director Webster does not shy away from the crime itself and while his portrayal of the events is more stylized than realistic, the effect is pretty graphic. Vining and Gamboa avoid the pitfall of romanticizing the killers, providing the right mix of innocence and naïveté with a generous dose of creepiness that makes the boys authentically scary. But the show aspires to be more than just a re-telling of the events. In this version, Clay is interviewed in prison by a young sociology major from the college whose own relationships consist of narcissistically using others in ways that differ from Clay’s more by degree than by character. Some of the analysis is a bit tedious and the script lacks the consistency necessary to make a coherent social comment, but the plot alone is enough to engage the audience thanks to the terrific cast and strong direction. Smart is not the best production that I have seen from Side Project Theatre, which is now in its eighth season; however, the up-and-coming company’s reputation for strong acting and creative use of minimalist space is still intact.
Recommended
Randy Hardwick
randyontheglobe@yahoo.com for comments
Date Reviewed: November 8, 2007
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