MAKING HEAVY OF LIFE
“Can you see magic?” That’s both process and purpose in Jordan Harrison’s deliberately dazzling 75-minute bravura piece The Grown-Up, now strutting its precious stuff in a Chicago premiere by Shattered Globe Theatre. The troupe’s last offering, The Rose Tattoo, was Tennessee Williams’ painstaking and heartbreaking travelogue through broken hearts in the deep South. This very small show delivers nothing as authentic. We’re confronted with an impressionistic, free-associating, “meta”-mongering feat of fantasies. In silly, scattered scenes, exhaustingly whimsical and intimidatingly indulgent, a 10-year-old boy falls victim to some aggressive enchantment.
A budding writer, Kay (Kevin Viol stretching from a kid to a geezer) is a pre-teen with a bratty sister named Annabelle (Christina Gorman). Eager to stoke his imagination, his foxy grandfather (Ben Werling) tells him about–and allows him to find–a magic crystal doorknob (no ruby slippers here–and the wardrobe leading to Narnia and hidden depot to Hogwarts were not available). The talisman links a series of slick vignettes that chronicle Kay’s entire career and inevitable demise, as well as Annabelle’s search for her brother and eventual homily over his grave.
Playing with possibilities that resemble demented dreams, Harrison’s adorably incoherent episodes depict Kay 15 years later trying to sell a TV script in L.A. to a stereotypically shallow producer whose series aren’t “into” anything, just “about” everything. Somehow the would-be writer disappears from this stream-of-unconsciousness, his fate tied up with a secretary named Rosie (Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel). We then see Kay at 40 with a cat and a younger boyfriend (Bryan Bosque). At 55, he marries a man closer to his own age. He also meets an old fisherman and a 
younger pirate. At 87, after losing his legs, he’s feted, dying and finally found by Annabelle when it’s too late. Along the way Kay likens himself to a piece of paper that gets crumpled but we smooth ourselves out in order to preserve our innocence (as an empty analogy, this is down there with Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates).
This is a play that actually believes you can be innocent twice in your life without benefit of a “second childhood” or electroshock (wishful thinking is the theater’s drug of choice). But the main argument is crudely illustrated by a quote in the program that I shudder to think really came from Hans Christian Andersen: “Enjoy life. There’s plenty of time to be dead.” An actual, very glib line from the play is much closer to the cause and effect of The Grown-Up: “The purpose of writing is to make shit up” (and I thought that’s what politicians were for). Here at least Harrison certainly succeeds. His glib catalogue of arbitrary events make Kay the poster boy for inept improvisation. Harrison’s frazzled attempts to suggest how much more varied life is than anyone’s conditional existence gets lost in the frantic details of a very overwritten one-act. Anything goes.
It’s necessarily overproduced as well: Krissy Vanderwarker’s double-downed staging has six actors frenetically moving color-coordinated crates, props and costumes, creating their own cat’s cradle of manic talespinning. The result is too much like a tiresome 10-year-old wearing down an adult audience with an irritating babble of arbitrary invention.
There is no grown-up in The Grown-Up. If only this stylistic exercise meant more. But it’s infatuated with its own motor-mouthed make-believe. “Can you see magic?” is the wrong question. “Can you tire from too much addlepated whimsy?” That one the play answers.
photos by Michael Brosilow
The Grown-Up
Shattered Globe Theatre
Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave
Thurs-Sat at 8; Sun at 3
ends on May 23, 2015
for tickets, call 773.975.8150 or visit www.theaterwit.org
for info on Chicago Theater, visit www.TheatreinChicago.com