Theater Review: ‘Guide for the Perplexed’ confusing blend of comedy and drama

Bubba Weiler (left) plays the anguished, closeted teenage nephew of Doug (Kevin Anderson), who's fresh out of prison, in Joel Drake Johnson's world premiere play 'A Guide for the Perplexed,' running through August 15th at Victory Gardens Biograph Theater. Photo provided.

“A Guide for the Perplexed” playwright Joel Drake Johnson could have used a guide for the confused. His latest work, beginning its world premiere run at Victory Gardens Theater, is sharply realized at times, and it does a nice job in particular landing a subtle, satisfying final moment. But overall “Perplexed” is a peculiar and ultimately unsuccessful blend of awkward comedy and bleak melodrama. In the hands of director Sandy Shinner, and particularly ace actors Kevin Anderson and Francis Guinan, the comedy comes naturally. But the heightened drama, which Johnson clearly intends to serve as the emotional center of the story, seems forced and unnatural. Anderson’s pacing isn’t good enough, and the dialogue not nuanced enough, to lend the necessary tension, pathos and realism, and Shinner and the cast struggle with the play’s radical mood swings.

Anderson is Doug, fresh out of a 68 month, one week and two day prison sentence for nearly killing a man in a fight. Doug is sober now, relatively mellow, but he’s still got anger issues, particularly with himself. His father dead and estranged from his mother, Doug turns to his sister Sheila (Meg Thalken) for help. She’s out of town on business, but allows her brother to stay in the den of the family’s home in Glencoe, Illinois with Sheila’s tightly wound, melancholy husband Phillip and her intelligent, emotionally unstable, bitter son Andrew (Bubba Weiler). Philip was fired from his job after being accused of stealing money, and he spends his aimless days reading trashy books, grocery shopping and testing out recipes for his own mayonnaise. Andrew has little respect for his parents, cuts classes, spins lies and yearns to kill himself. Doug may have just gotten out of prison, but these two characters are in their own prisons, even if it’s within a lovely home in the Chicago suburbs. Act two brings a new character, Betty (Cynthia Baker), a financial consultant from Cincinnati who became pen pals with Doug while he was in prison. She drives in from Ohio brandishing lavish gifts, anxious and excited to see Doug in person, and to hear him read some poems that he wrote to her from prison. But all it does is awake Doug’s self-loathing, although it does open up an opportunity for him to change his life.

Anderson lends some humanity to his Doug, but the writing of the character fails him. In one scene, he’s extremely mellow and affable, and then suddenly he breaks out in a fit of intense anger. These emotions are understandable, but the character’s emotional transitions never occur organically. The same can be said of Weiler’s Andrew, who acts cool and cynical one minute, then erupts with seething misery the next. Again, understandable emotions, but an unbelievable execution. And Baker makes her Betty a sweet, quietly sad character, and plays nicely in her scenes with Anderson, but Johnson doesn’t do a good enough job showing us why this woman would be so invested in Doug, not only to write him letters in the first place, but to travel all the way from Ohio brandishing gifts that include $6,000 tickets to The Rolling Stones.

Philip is the best creation in this work, and Guinan’s performance is spot on. In humorously banal and telling, if repetitive scenes, Philip walks through his anal rules and routines, painstakingly making the bed with Doug, showing him how the blinds work and teaching him how to feed his exotic fish. It’s the only aspect of his life that he can control, and he grasps it with intensity of purpose as a way to ignore all that’s gone wrong in his life. But as with Doug and Andrew, even Philip’s actions in the more dramatic scenes feel forced. It’s hard to believe that someone so weak-willed, who rarely makes eye contact with anyone, would have the strength to injure Doug in the first act, as Johnson pens it. Harder still is to see Philip calmly read a book minutes after discovering that his son “accidentally” killed his exotic fish. Just another example of a mood swing I couldn’t swallow.

That said, there are some dramatic moments, particularly in act two, that are strong, like Philip’s calmly, sadly, suggesting divorce to Sheila, and a final moment between Doug and Andrew that, despite the pair’s uneasy, unbelievable relationship, is surprisingly moving. These scenes work because they’re subtle, because they’re believable, because they’re real. But these scenes are too few in a play that’s too long.

At least we have Philip. But hopefully we’ll have more cohesive writing and characters from Johnson the next time around.

Grade: C+

“A Guide for the Perplexed” runs through August 15th at Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln. Tickets are $40-$50 and available here.