Love-Lies-Bleeding
Indeed, you may find your eyes closing against your will. With nothing crucial to feed on despite highly competent acting and beautiful stage pictures, the optic orb all too easily opts out.
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The measured pace of Amy Morton’s distanced, deliberate Steppenwolf production tends to exacerbate DeLillo’s shortcomings, making his story that much less interesting for being slower and defeating his rare attempts at humor. The show’s far more glum than it has to be. Scenic designer Loy Arcenas injects a little interest by filling the back of the playing area with a glowing southwestern landscape, but the only other glow onstage comes from Martha Lavey’s Toinette. Alternately wised-up, rueful, and coquettish (when she’s flirting with the prestroke Alex), Lavey constitutes the production’s sole locus of individuated humanity. She makes Toinette a person.
Where: Steppenwolf Theatre Company, upstairs theater, 1650 N. Halsted
