Companies collaborate for an exhilarating, audacious repertory

January 29, 11:34 PMChicago Theatre Review ExaminerCatey Sullivan

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Take in the American Theatre Company’s balls-to-the-wall staging of True West, and you will never look at your kitchen toaster the same way again. Hyper-violent, uproariously funny and sublimely profane, the piece is a gleefully destructive Cain and Abel fable. If you’re sitting in a front row, watch out for shrapnel. And the occasional kitchen appliance.

In collaborating with Congo Square Theatre Company and pairing Sam Shepard’s seismic brotherly meltdown with Suzan Lori-Parks’ equally volcanic top dog/underdog, ATC unveils one of the most ambitious productions of the season. Together, the duel stories of brothers in arms make for an exhausting and exhilarating four-hour emotional epic. Or eight hours, if you want to see the both casts do both plays.

Directed by ATC Artistic Director PJ Paparelli (True West) and Congo Square Artistic Director Derrick Sanders (topdog/underdog), the actors mix it up, switching shows in an audacious repertory. The pieces are so symbiotic it’s amazing that nobody has thought of this brash mash-up previously. Through text and subtext, allegorical implication and literal action, the dramas refract off each other like crazy mirror images.

The brothers at the center of td/ud are traditionally played by two African American actors; in TW, by two white actors. Here, African American actors Daniel Bryant and Anthony Irons also get a shot at TW while the Matthew Brumlow and Stephen Louis Grush switch to td/ud at alternating performances.

Both dramas shows center on the fractured, fractious love/hate relationship between siblings. In TW, screenwriter Lee (Brumlow, plumbing visceral depths that defy his pretty-boy looks) and quasi-homeless drifter grafter Austin (Grush, delivering fatalistic comedy with knockout fervor) are holed up in their mother’s California home.

They’re like gasoline and detergent: Mix the two together and you have yourself some homegrown Napalm.

With td/ud, aspiring card hustler Booth (Bryant, exuding both childlike neediness and brute danger, a combo that makes you simultaneously fear him and fear for him ) and his brother Lincoln (Irons, taut as an overwound guitar string, and nailing the marrow-deep brooding depression of a man flailing for direction).

Like Lee and Austin, Lincoln and Booth two cling to each other (and go for each other’s throats) as they try repair the irreparable damage inflicted by their parents and find peace in a world that keeps shooting them in the head. Literally in Lincoln’s case; he plays Abe Lincoln in an arcade, wearing white face and a stovepipe hat as customers pay to reenact Lincoln’s final moments.

If Parks’ dialogue comes at you like jazz (Irons especially has the riffs down to a virtuosic patter) Brumlow and Grush deliver escalating explosions. Listen, for instance, to Grush’s crescendoing frustration with crickets – by the time he absolutely loses it over the benign but uncontrollable insects, (about the time of day when “coyotes…kill peoples’ cocker spaniels”) you’d swear his head was about to blow half way to kingdom come.

The quartet is just as effective in quietly devastating moments , making “True West” and “topdog/underdog” add up to a theatrical grand slam.