Review: "The Sleeper" The Riverfront Playhouse, Aurora, IL 6/26/10

When the lights went down and the music began, I heard the distinctive sound of the Ultra-Lounge music series.  I am a big fan, and I was in heaven.  Then the music stopped and the show started.  The title of the show is The Sleeper, and as a word, it best describes the show.  Written by Catherine Butterfield and set in 2002, the story is a dark comedy about national paranoia after the 9/11 attacks.


An interesting concept to be sure, but it is explored so superficially that it left me feeling that it was not so much a story she wanted to write, but something onto which she could hang her "surprise" ending.  A means to an end, if you will.  And, about 25 minutes into it, I knew what the surprise was going to be because nothing else could logically explain what I was seeing in the presentation.  But I won't give it away.  Here's how they describe the show at Dramatist Play Service:  A suburban "security mom," shell-shocked by the new post 9/11 reality, finds herself irresistibly drawn to her son's tutor, a handsome young man with political leanings far different from her own.  Her "awakening" leads to a bizarre series of events that blow the lid off her previously sheltered existence and change the lives of all around her. A dark and slightly zany comedy. 


The show plays on one level, and the execution of this production didn't help.  On whole, the cast came across weak and tentative and certainly not in command of the material.  In addition, the pace was deadly slow in spots, and uneven.  There was no flow to the progression of the show.


The main focus of the show is Gretchen, played by Beth Goncher.  For this show to work, the audience has to care about Gretchen, her emotional journey and story arc.   Unfortunately, the character as written is neither compelling nor an empathetic figure, and I never felt that even Goncher believed in the character she was portraying.  She was stilted and removed, and that eventually translates to a lack of connection and empathy with the audience.


Her husband Bill, who is too involved with his company's upcoming IPO to notice Gretchen's decline into paranoia, is portrayed by Thomass Dickens.  He has a few fine comic moments, but overall his timing was slow on the pickups and dragged down many of the scenes.  Nikki Edwards plays Vivian, Gretchen's alcoholic sister.  I thought there was too much acting going on when she was on stage and the overall effect was forced.


Rob Siebert plays Matthew, the tutor.  I'm not sure if it was Rob, or the writing, but the character lacks depth.  Maybe this is to enhance the mystique of Gretchen's lover by not revealing too much?  But in my notes, I wrote, "This is the stud she has the hots for??"  Again, nothing compelling about a principal character, so as more was revealed, I just didn't care.  He is just a story convenience to get to the surprise ending.  Maybe the author did a little reverse engineering here;  started where she wanted it to end, and worked backwards.

Steve Ramussen, Luke Pascale, and Denise D'Asto, round out the cast, playing various characters.  Some good, some not so good.  There is a scene of an anthrax safety seminar, with Rasussen as the speaker, that could have been very funny.  Unfortunately, Ramussen either had trouble with the lines or decided to act really hard, and depleted the scene of its comic nature.  Then he and Pascale end up playing Arabic men and I found myself laughing for all the wrong reasons.

A main ingredient missing from this stew is passion.  We should feel a smoldering desire between the mom and the tutor.  But there was no chemistry between them.  The faux-sex scene they had in bed was lame and boring.  They looked like kids crawling around in the plastic ball pit at Chucky Cheese.  Hell, she kept her shoes on during the entire scene.  So, again, I was left thinking, "Who cares?"


Something that annoyed me as I was watching the show is something I have seen a lot recently.  Actors need to find the light in the scene.  That's in every scene where you should be lit.  But, if your character is one who breaks the 4th wall and speaks directly to the audience bathed in a different light than the rest of the scene, find the damn light.  Look, I have to assume you want to be up there for different reasons, one of which is to be noticed for what you're doing.  The audience can't fully appreciate what you're doing in your moment to shine when you leave half your face out of the light.  Feel the heat, check your placement on the stage to the spill of light...something, anything.  Just find the frigging light.  If we can't see you, we stop caring.

As I mentioned, the pace was off.  It was chunky, if that makes sense.  Starts and stops and hiccups, like a car that can't get its pistons firing in sequence.  There was no awareness of flow.  Again, I'm not sure if this is because of the actors, director or writer.  I suspect it was an unfortunate mixture of the three, and it never quite gelled.


I did get the feeling as I watched the show that it would have played better as a one-act.  Maybe it would have given the show a longer runway to pick up speed and really take off at the end, allowing it to become the zany comedy as described by Dramatist.  The intermission broke up any momentum the show had gained despite its chunky pacing and things had to get started again to build up to the ending...in this case, a big surprise.  It didn't work out that way. As I did research on this show, it ran 80 minutes at most theatres it played at.


For info on tickets, visit their web site.


Run time: 1 hour, 39 minutes  (looks like they did insert the intermission)


Price: $15

It was NOT worth the price of admission.