MARY-ARRCHIE BLOG

Pump Boys and Dinettes, this isn’t. The rural citizenry whom we meet at Zesto’s diner on the outskirts of Claybourne Rising—a town so wretched that the local schoolteacher cheerfully informs its children that they are living in hell—have grown foul-mouthed and foul-tempered with the reflexive hostility of trapped animals despairing of deliverance from their squalid environment, never mind passage to a better one. But don’t you just know that one stormy night, a stranger will invade their community—a feral waif who just might be a jen-yoo-wine heavenly messenger—and with agonizing slowness, the unhappy derelicts, one by one, will find themselves turning toward the good.

Keith Huff has a play going to Broadway this fall, so it’s instructive to recall that in 1989, this prolific Chicago playwright composed an old-fashioned morality fable steeped in the bucolic fairy-tale lore so beloved of urban authors. But while the number of modern American dramas set in short-order eateries are surpassed only by those located in likewise remote hotels, bus stations and taverns ( the better to keep the dramatic microcosm at once varied and stationary ) , this is a genre rapidly approaching its expiration date as anything but a rite-of-passage exercise for writing workshops. Add in the propensity of young authors to overstate their case, and what we’re left with in 2009 is a scenario as anonymously shopworn as the mid-’50s pop tunes on Zesto’s jukebox.

The world of sunbleached awnings, grease-clotted grills and diesel fumes has been home to Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company’s gritty underdog cosmology from its debut production in 1986 ( Sam Shepard, naturally ) . Bill Anderson’s decor captures in vivid detail the ambience of wayside cafés far from the tourist trade, right down to the mud tracked in by the hapless pedestrians giving the play its title ( as in "stuck in it and can’t get out" ) . Under the direction of Carlo Lorenzo Garcia, an ensemble of storefront veterans embrace their stereotypical personae with an empathy devoid of mockery, deftly camouflaging Huff’s more expedient-driven incredulities to invoke an appropriately solemn tone throughout. Mary Jo Bolduc and Michele Gorman deliver noteworthy performances as the piteous captives in this prison with ketchup bottles, but Richard Cotovsky, after a long career of playing heartless bullies, also deserves commendations for his spillover-free portrayal of the patriarchal tyrant who would shackle even the angels to his own petty schemes.