The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre continues its season with a production of a world premiere. Kurt McGinnis Brown's Broken and Entered is a poetically brutal drama. Jonathan Leslie Wainwright and Andrew Edwin Voss star as Vernon and Wally. Chance and circumstance have found Abran and Wally returning to there've childhood home. Things are not going well for them. They have financial problems but their hunger goes far deeper than their wallets.
As the play opens they are burglarizing a house. We find out that they're not burglarizing houses to find things of value. Not monetary value, anyway.
The hunger manifests itself differently in both men. For Wally take the form of a search for romantic love. For Vern it takes the form of a need to redefine himself. It is Verns hunger is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the script. It is why they take nothing of monetary value from the homes they burglarize. Vern is not looking to get ahead financially. He is looking to redefine himself by tearing out everything he remembers as being familiar in his childhood home and replacing it with other people stuff. You want to redefine himself so that he does not recognize himself. He wants to become someone different. Someone he can respect.
Wainwright does an excellent job of taking the interesting psyche of this man and rendering it in a very compelling way for the stage. This has to be the best performance I've seen him do since Kyobi on offense with next act how long, long time ago.
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Andrew Edwin Voss is equally compelling as a romantic. A deeply flawed, deeply emotionally hungry romantic. He doesn't want to redefine himself, he seems more interested in elevating himself through idealized notions. This type of character is a lot more common in drama. And it's a lot more difficult to make fresh and original. Voss does a really good job however. There's a kind of restless frenzy about his performance here.
Marti Gobel plays the woman he is falling in love with. She is a wealthy African American woman. Her presence here draws the script into socioeconomic and cultural areas that serve it pretty well. But this isn't necessarily I'm about race relations so much as it is about disparity between different socioeconomic classes. Her character is in a position to be very hardened and very bitter. That a romantic would be falling in love with her is something that's made implausible by virtue of an ephemeral grace that she's able to bring to thesteely cynicism of the character. Not that the character is written at all to be a flat stereotype of call, unemotional wealth. Quite the contrary. There's depth here. There's texture. And Goebel takes that texture and creates a high-defemotional manifestation. There isn't a lot of poetry in the words she speaks. But she speaks very politically. There is a kind of Fitzerald pragmatism about the poetry that the two brothers speak in. References made to a mother curled into a? On the floor of the house and it's one of the more haunting bits of dialogue I've heard all year. Browns a script as it is present here makes really, really remarkably compelling case for the development of new work by local playwrights.
The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's production of Broken and Entered runs through October 14 at the Broadway theater centers studio Theatre. For ticket reservations call 414-291-7800.
