Six weeks after my mother died of colon cancer in 2008 (which was almost eight years after my dad died of lung cancer), my sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which would take her life six and a half years later. The day my sister died, my other sister’s mother-in-law fell down the basement stairs at her home and died of her injuries a couple of hours after my sister passed. Somewhere in the timeline, my other sister was also diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. (She’s still with us, thank god.)
The Malignant Ampersands Through 11/27: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells, 312-943-8722, aredorchidtheatre.org, $30-$40
So maybe I’m the target audience for a play like Brett Neveu’s The Malignant Ampersands, in which a once-prominent family has fallen from wealth and happiness into a surreal world of unending sickness and the clammy fears that living surrounded by such illness unleashes in your psyche. Now in its world premiere at Neveu’s artistic home, A Red Orchid Theatre, under the direction of frequent Neveu collaborator Dado, the show is described in press materials as “a very unofficial sequel to Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.”
You don’t really need to know the 1942 film (based on Booth Tarkington’s 1918 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) to understand the world of Neveu’s play. In fact, you might find it challenging to understand Neveu’s world, whether you’ve seen the film or his deliberately opaque work before or not. (Neveu, a longtime friend and collaborator of Michael Shannon, seems poised for a larger national profile now that Shannon has directed a film version of his 2002 play, Eric LaRue.)
One salient fact, though, is that Welles’s film has become the stuff of cinematic folklore: his original 131-minute cut was slashed by RKO to 88 minutes while Welles was working in Brazil on the ill-fated It’s All True. The original director’s cut has become a holy grail for cinematic historians. And just as they search for the missing pieces that will make the final picture make more sense, or at least closer to their ideal vision, so too do the Ampersands.
We first meet Gabe (Travis A. Knight), a somewhat awkward young man who nevertheless is tasked with running various relatives around to their medical appointments, while he’s on the phone with Corey (Steve Schine), who appears to be the putative head of the family, though some sort of respiratory ailment keeps him housebound. (The actual relationships they all have with each other remain vague throughout—a symbol of how they’re just making their lives together out of scraps of the past. Since the characters tend to refer to each other by their proper names throughout rather than use pronouns, those too are on the vague side.)
Gabe is at the Dollar Store, which is next to the Goodwill, where he’s put a deposit down on a foosball table, and he’s hoping Hiker (Meighan Gerachis) can help him pick it up, even though Hiker lost their hands to osteosarcoma at some point. Gabe moons about the old family photos from when their ancestors lived in a big house in town, surrounded by nice things. But Corey tells him, “You have to figure it out for yourself. If you want nice things like in those photos, you have to get out of your own way and follow through.”
So far, that sounds like the kind of send-up of therapy-speak that Neveu has used before (notably in Eric LaRue, where the attempts of a mother of a school shooter to find some “closure” come to naught as she’s barraged with empty bromides from her husband and pastor). But thinking that you’re entitled to some nice stuff when everything around you is turning to shit isn’t unhealthy; what does your head in is thinking that the universe cares whether you get it or not.
So yeah, this is a grim and absurd piece that doesn’t always make narrative sense. Gabe’s youngest relative, Summer (Emilie Maureen Hanson), sees a large shadow figure (a lifesize alien-like creature created by Lolly Extract of Jabberwocky Marionettes) that might be a figment of a brain tumor, or might be a realization of the dark fate surrounding all these characters, just beyond the vinyl curtains at the back of Grant Sabin’s deliberately dingy set (a portable commode doubles as a chair for the family, if that’s not too on the nose as a metaphor). Regardless, the shadow creature teaches Summer a creepy poem: “Sometimes the crypt can be comforting / Dirt and Stones / Moonlight shining through cracks / A worn path literally headed to death’s literal door.”
Meantime, West Ampersand (the delightfully choleric John Judd) indulges in a wide range of conspiracy theories about the health-care industry that have just enough truth to them to be compelling. Gabe avoids visiting the deathbed of his sort-of cousin Jamie by going over to have a sort-of date with barista Bobbie (Jackie Seijo). But he can’t outrun his family’s fate, apparently.
If you hate stories that resist interpretation, this probably isn’t your show. And I certainly hope most of you don’t have the same family history with cancer that I do. (It sucks, trust me.) But somehow, Neveu’s story felt closer to the truth about what it feels like to be down the rabbit hole of family death and sickness than any number of more straightforward narrative pieces I’ve seen. I’m not sure I can recommend it for everyone, but the adroit work by the ensemble will at least mean you won’t be bored. Does it make sense? No, not always, and the end is particularly befuddling. And that, sadly, is the point.