Szymkowicz loosely based Pretty Theft on Charles Mee’s Hotel Cassiopeia, which examined the glorified life of box artist Joseph Cornell. After seeing Hotel Cassiopeia at the Court Theatre in 2006, I was disgusted by how the precision of the SITI company could be applied to a play that was so aimless in its examination of a celebrated artist’s life. Conversely, Pretty Theft, which only takes from Cassiopeia the character named “Joe” who is fascinated by ballerinas, has a relatively clear and larger thematic aim: the simultaneous allure and danger of beauty. Yet Szymkowicz, who is a more enthusiastic but less precise playwright than Mee, can’t seem to find a way to bring it all together. Pretty Theft is an admirably ambitious play, but one that can’t find a center to bring it all together. Part of the problem is utilizing eight actors and even more characters. By trying to tell each character’s story, he loses us along the way.
In general we are focused on the turbulent, traumatic summer before college of Allegra (Marnie Schulenberg), who despite having nearly everything going for her can’t seem to break herself out of a nearly permanent funk. Everyone around her senses her purity and naïveté, but all react to it differently, be it her wild childhood friend Suzy (Maria Portman Kelly), who admires the kind of lifestyle Allegra is able to maintain (great college, great boyfriend, great resources), or her dimwitted boyfriend Bobby (Zack Robidas), whose resentment of Allegra is backed by the same societal logic that lets Marco know he will get away with his crimes.
While society may simply allow Marco to get away with horrific acts, his own reasoning is more complex. A cross between a poet, philosopher, and sociopath, Marco is the only character who understands the realities of the value of beauty in today’s society, and he is as disgusted by that valuation as he is drawn to it. When we first meet Marco, he claims to be “retired” from his job of stealing beautiful things. By the end, he’s committed the most horrific kind of theft imaginable. Like Roy Cohn in Angels in America, Marco is the only one in the play with the courage and shamelessness to exploit a cultural weakness that is vulnerable to exploitation. The last time I saw d’Amour, he was putting his hyper-gruff voice and attitude into a comedic context in last summer’s exceptional, underrated What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends. Here he’s taken that persona to its natural extreme, and I’ll be damned if d’Amour doesn’t give one of the better performances as a villain I’ve seen all year.
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