A play about the weather may infuriate those who bemoan the state of America’s political theater—isn’t the weather something people talk about when they're avoiding politics? I for one do not share this concern about American theater, and the idea behind A Great Place To Be From (with the emphasis on “From”), a play which examines how human psychology is strained in temperatures that humans were simply not meant to live in, is certainly an interesting conceit for a play. The deadly Chicago heat wave of 1995 was addressed by not one but two plays this year alone, so as the saying goes, three plays about deadly Midwestern heat waves is a trend. While A Great Place focuses on a more recent heat wave and is set in Milwaukee, its premise is not the problem. The pitfalls of the play lie in its execution.
A Great Place to Be From consists entirely of monologues, all of which are performed with an exceptional degree of realism in acting, writing, and directing. They tell of an unemployed loser reconnecting with his wife during a power outage, a man who gives a blood transfusion to his dog, an embittered grocery store clerk with a paranoid manager, and, in one extended monologue (so extended that it was about half an hour too long), a peeping-tom housewife who watches her neighbor’s teenage son naked…while she's pretending to be one-legged. All the monologues are occasionally funny, and all the actors do a deft job with their roles. The bare-bones set and brilliant lighting effects do wonders in the black box setting.
The main problems of A Great Place come from playwright Norman Lasca’s constant attempts to add a higher significance to what are otherwise minor storytelling events. Lasca shows some promise as a writer, though he will have to write a more extensive dialogue-based play before his true skill can be assessed. But in each of the monologues, Lasca’s writing forces his actors to play an excessively impassioned defense of what seem like minor issues. Lasca’s justifications for jumping into seriousness are often quite flimsy—though some of the psychologies behind his characters are more believable than others. Lasca has given out higher-meaning emotions and language when he can’t seem to find a deeper or higher meaning.
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