Early this holiday season, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Things Being What They Are--a comedy about a couple of guys who end up as neighbors. The guys in question are Bill (played by Ryan Schabach and Jack (Dan Katula.) It's a contemporary comedy that could kind of be pitched as a deeper, more contemporary version of the Odd Couple. See: Bill just moved into his new condo.
Bill's a really clean and neat guy who likes things to be organized. (Played by Scahbach, he's kind of a younger married Felix Ungar.) Bill is a marketing guy for The Seagram Company. He's got issues with his job and his employer. And his wife has been a little distant . . . actually she doesn't even show up at all over the course of the play.
Jack is his next door neighbor--kind of a slob with kind of a brusk manner about him. He works as an accountant. I think he said he works as an accountant for Sear. It's kind of hard to follow specific details with this guy because he doesn't really have any sense of tact. No internal filter. Played by Dan Katula, he's kind of an older Oscar Madison. He's not the most liberated guy in the world, but he's intellectual in his own way and possesses a great deal of wisdom.
It's a fun and very, very social play. We're basically seeing two guys get to know each other and we're hanging out with them as they do. A very casual evening of theatre with a couple of guys playing a couple of guys having a couple of beers over the course of a couple of different conversations. Very casual stuff that does make more than a few turns towards the deeper end of things. Everything about the conversation is casual. Even the beer. (Before the intermission: Budweiser After the intermission: Dos Equis. So, y'know, nothing fancy.) It's a casual set. Some of the walls didn't quite show-up. All the door frames are there that need to be there. There's some furniture. There's a landline phone. (That's actually kind of important.) The cool thing about it is that the plot as such doesn't really follow a traditional structure. It's just a couple of guys talking. And, like I say, we gradually get to know them. Director Michael Cotey and company have done their work. Because there's nothing more formal than pretending to be casual onstage. And usually, we as an audience are doing a lot of work in making a staged conversation come across as being casual. thanks to Cotey, Schabach and Katula, we as an audience don't need to do a whole lot of work to complete the illusion.
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At first, it's the type of conversation two people might find themselves having when they first meet and don't know quite where the boundaries are. Jack is forceful, blatantly imposing on a guy who has just moved in as his neighbor and doesn't seem to notice that he's being rude or presumptuous. Of course, Katula does all the work he needs to do to make the character more than charming enough to overcome the character's obvious sliminess. This is a really, really charming production. Really. It's fun if you know what you're getting into. And I hope that I've been able to shed a little light on that with these paragraphs.
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's production of Things Being What They Are runs through December 15th at the Broadway Theatre Center's Studio Theatre. For ticket reservations, call 414-291-7800 or visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.
