Photos courtesy of 16th Street Theatre.Top - Donald Blair (left) and Chris Cantelmi. Bottom: Ann James.
This review was originally published in July, 2009 in Pioneer Press Newspapers.
You know these people. And you fervently hope that they are not you. They are the anti-celebrants of The Last Barbecue, as bleak a gathering as you'll find between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
Whose idea was it, exactly, to have a barbecue in memory of the neighbor who dropped dead behind his lawnmower while grooming his suburban lawn for last summer's shindig? That would be playwright Brett Neveu. One of his earliest (and for my money, best works) this tale of the worst weenie roast ever has the inspired pitch-black comedic brilliance of Despair.com and the horrific familiarity of an old family photo album.
The RC cola is the tip-off, wearily tossed into a battered cooler at the top of the show by a numbly exhausted, glaze-eyed, beer-bellied Everyputz glumly setting up for guests in his boring backyard. This family doesn't even warrant Pepsi products. They're serving RC, the Old Style of soda brands.
Layered into the deceptively banal chatter about citronella candles, warm beer and old high school grlfriends, Neveu has packed more desperation than the Titanic carried in its final water-borne moments. Everybody is quiet, pathetic neediness, loneliness and pure, primal rage. Nobody wants to be at this party, no matter how they chirp about fun and Frisbee games. It's hilarious in the darkest possible way. Neveu's elliptical dialogue is defined by pauses that evoke Pinter, and an often unspoken but unmissable undertow of dangerously unvented anger and Sisyphean frustration.
Director Ann Filmer helmed the debut staging of The Last Barbecue in 2000. The years haven't diminished either the humor or the devastating view of everyday people who would surely have ended it all at 18 had they only known what their lives would look like 10, 20 and 30 years down the road.
On the earlier end of that timeline are Barry (Chris Cantelmi) and his unlikely wife Tammy (Nancy Friedrich, nailing the faux perky, people-pleasing cheeriness of the incurably needy).
The hosts of the title event are Barry's parents Ted (Donald Blair, dead-on as a suburban nobody whose disgust with his life manifests itself in a bleary, 1,000-yard stare and a passive-aggressive hostility toward everyone and everything he comes in contact with) and Jan (Ann James, whose ceaseless, automaton smile and useless fussing precisely foretell what Tammy will be like in 20 years). Finally, there's Ashley Bishop's Kathy, the corn-fed femme fatale who escaped the stripmall suburb that holds the rest in some neo-circle of Dante's inferno. Wisely, Kathy decides not to visit for long.
As Barry, Cantelmi came late to the party, going on with little more than a single rehearsal after actor Matthew Brumlow became ill last week. Cantelmi was still carrying a script opening night, but his depiction of a self-absorbed, loudly obnoxious and utterly clueless 20-something is so accurate you could drop him into a Lincoln Park sports bar on a Saturday night and nobody would peg him for an actor.
You don't want to miss this Barbecue -- even if you hope you'll never be invited to such a gathering.
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