Revenge of the Reified

By Shamrock McShane

Clocking in at a swift 75 minutes, the Hippodrome's production of The Smell of the Kill by Michele Lowe plays like a slick TV show — a good one, well–scripted and acted, and put together with high production values. Aided by libations, it is a heavy dose of the Dionysian and more than faintly lurid.

It is the view of the petit bourgeois from the well–appointed kitchen. Three wives — Debra, Nicky, and Molly, played winningly by Nell Page, Laura Rohner, and Cady West Garey — are in the kitchen, while their boorish husbands play in the living room and dining room we cannot see.

The playwright is clever at stagecraft. Only theatricians write plays like this, knowing the Janus–like properties of life in the theater.

There are always two plays going on anyway — the one the audience sees onstage, and its frenetic or solipsistic doppelganger, life backstage. Why not exploit the existence of the two worlds, instead of using one merely to hide the other?

We are looking at the kitchen of a house in Wilmette that sells for one point two five million dollars. The setting, which must resonate with Robert Satterlee, the Hipp's visiting director from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, is Wilmette, a fashionable suburb of Chi–town.

This is life in the suburbs. It is insipid and it is small–minded, and despite the lofty view of all they survey on Wisteria Lane, John Updike got to the Matterhorn of middle class depravity in the 1960s when he wrote Couples.

This is Rob and Laura Petry gone bad. Wretched emotions. Murderous passions. The snares of a dead institution. Degeneration through marriage.

Here the ladies discover all the messy spaghetti strands of their commodity–driven lives are threatening to strangle them. They themselves have been reified. They are humans who have been turned into things, and they are things rejected at that, by their former lovers, who, unfortunately, are still their husbands.

The action unfolds in real time. Again, this is fine stagecraft. You seem to experience the events in the same chronology as the characters.

All three sexy broads beg the question: what kind of red–blooded male would neglect them, let alone reject them? We are told of the transformation of one of the husbands from vegetarian Democrat to beast. That might constitute the dramatic action — but no. We hate the men offstage, but we cannot quite humanize them. The men never appear, thank goodness.

Here are the highlights they sorely missed. Oh my, a cat fight in their underwear. So, one broad says to another, "Take off your shirt and stay a while." Latex.

Nell Page, in her form–hugging skirt, makes dreams come true when she bends over to pick up a slew of rolling golf balls. It gets better. Herešs Nell bent over a table with another broad on top of her. Nell's gymnastics are a sight to behold.

None of the three characters is particularly intelligent. Here are actresses clearly more intelligent and interesting than the characters they play. Nevertheless, their ensemble playing is superb.

They dream of the people they could have been. "Moscow," as the Three Sisters put it in Chekhov's play, summing up all their wishes in the very notion of the big city. But what do these women dream of? It's bad when one's very dreams are mundane. There's no getting away from it.

Life, for more and more of us, devolves into a mystery, not a whodunit, but: how? We live in amazement and wonder that relationships can go so wrong. Everyone, it seems, is asking, what in the world did I ever see in him/her?

It's not him or her. It's marriage. It's a dead institution. Just like the family. How many reminders do we need? That's why it is the stuff of jokes — and crass entertainment. What we have here is high class crass.

And the theater makes it even better; a live performance trumps TV and the internet.

But this isn't a soap opera, where an airhead with a pretty face and a nice figure can spin straw into gold. This is the theater, and there's no gold to be spun this side of Broadway. You make an honest living and sometimes you make art.

These are professional actresses, and good ones, they want to sink their teeth into something of substance. If there's a truth to a scene they will ferret it out and cling to it.

That'ls what happens in The Smell of the Kill, and it throws the play off balance. They have to work too damn hard to be funny, when to be true is so damn easy. So the play unsettles us, and not in a good way. Unless it is sufficient compensation to you as a consumer to reify the actresses yourself, turn them into things. In which case, the merchandise is clearly top shelf.