‘Another Tale of Eddie’ at Alchemist

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Photo Credit: Aaron Kopec

April Paul, David Sapiro and Shannon Nettesheim stars in 'Another Tale of Eddie'

The Alchemist Theatre’s Another Tale of Eddie delivers on some of theater’s potential to explore the illusory nature of reality in a gritty, visceral earthbound narrative. People onstage pretend to be people offstage who are pretending to be people they’re not. Everyone here (real and fictitious) seems to be in search of some kind of truth.

David Sapiro and April Paul are charmingly reprehensible as Eddie and and Izzy. They’re a couple of grifters living in Manhattan in the early days of the CBGB. They act as a team lifting money from tourists they run into at the club. Shannon Nettesheim has a presence that sparkles like a constellation of chipping chrome in the rusted-over squalor of Eddie’s life. She’s entered Eddie’s filthy, decaying apartment as a possible victim. She could potentially leave it as something else altogether.

The script winds its way around the plot tightly enough that we’re not seeing the characters in total clarity, but that’s part of its beauty. With Another Tale of Eddie, playwright Aaron Kopec (under the fake name of Adian Zix) explores the lies that we tell everyone who will listen including those familiar strangers reflected at us from passing mirrors. The story progresses and we don’t really get to know anybody, but we do get some rather interesting, little insights into the nature of dishonesty grounded in an era before artifice got so indelibly fused with the substance of contemporary culture. For their part, the acting ensemble is telling a really compelling lie onstage. Sapiro and Nettesheim have an interesting intellectual chemistry together that is sharply shadowed in Paul’s portrayal of genuine concern for the victim at the center of the story.

Through March 28 at Alchemist Theatre, 2569 S. Kinnickinnic Ave. For tickets, visit thealchemisttheatre.com.