After at Profiles Theatre
★★☆☆☆
Profiles Theatre (see Resident
companies). By Chad Beckim. Dir.
Matt Hawkins. With ensemble
cast. 1hr 30mins; no intermission.
Monty (J. Salomé Martinez) is newly returned to the world, an ex-convict released after nearly two decades in prison. The twist is he never should have been convicted at all. At age 17, he was sent to prison on charges of rape; now, he’s been exonerated thanks to DNA evidence and finds himself a 34-year-old unable to navigate the toothbrush aisle or cross the street without someone else telling him to move. He paces the dining-room floor of his deceased parents’ house, now occupied only by his sister, Liz (Alice daCunha), who bears some scars of her own from Monty’s tribulations.
Chad Beckim’s quiet 2011 play offers a genuinely intriguing premise: What must everyday tasks look like to someone who was removed from society before his senior prom, particularly in a wrongful conviction? Martinez, an appealing Los Angeles transplant making his Chicago debut,suggests sublimated feelings roiling beneath his skin, even if his facial expression too often seems limited to a warily cocked eyebrow.
But Beckim undercuts his work’s subdued effectiveness with a pair of characters whose injections of comic relief feel artificial: a chirpily quirky drugstore clerk who becomes Monty’s love interest, and a sulky doggie day-care manager who becomes his employer. Though their portrayers, Stephenie Park and Gabriel Ruiz, do fine work, the characters and Beckim’s schematic plot feel calculated in a way that Matt Hawkins’s empathetic, up-close staging can’t quite disguise.—Kris Vire
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