MALE DISBONDING
Friendship tests us in ways we never signed up for: Plays about it task us by making us measure what we would do when the characters’ choices come too close for comfort. Reviving its 2008 production of Our Bad Magnet, Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co. has retained the original actors and, I assume, recreated the confederate mystery of Douglas Maxwell’s drama of four Scottish friends seen across two decades. These loud lads, glimpsed in decade-long flashbacks from the perspective of 2001, all but embody Girvan, their small Scottish town below a cliff. Here Alan (John Wilson), Fraser (Dan Behrendt), Paul (Layne Manzer), and Gordon–called “Giggles” (Lane Flores)–pass from 9 to 29, growing up too fast and moving on but not far enough.
Presented in the present, the play’s end and start attempt to make sense of the middle years, specifically the loss of innocence that’s sadly a “coming of age” rite of initiation (and I don’t mean the village tradition of dressing up like Vikings). Only retroactively, after we see the pain they drown in pubs do we feel what they need to reclaim.
The first three guys are crudely conventional playmates and punks, hating school and distrusting parents, engaging in boyhood bets, making up neologisms and hoping they’ll last, indulging in secrets and promises, and hunting for girls, with Alan eventually betraying Paul by shagging his wife Tina. But their misfit chum Giggles remains a conundrum, a shy self-slasher who hates his ventriloquist dad but likes fires and is obsessed with police files.
Having no T.V. at home, this tormented recluse has developed a defensive imagination: He regales these conditional friends with stories like the title one (about a suicidal magnet upset that magnets can only repel and not attract). Then there’s “The Garden in the Sky,” a lark of a parable about a king who grows beyond his lust for gold to create an aerial escape that drops blossoms on the audience as the tale is reenacted. The boys warm to Giggles’ enchantments. He can see things and use words to make them matter. Giggles ends up writing lyrics for the crude EMO act that the boys have created by 1991, but he also proves too anti-social for a boys’ band. When he’s fired, it becomes a hurt too hard to be processed into make-believe.
By play’s end Giggles has disappeared (presumably drowned), though Fraser doggedly denies he’s dead. Alan, now in publishing, has collected the stories that Giggles left behind in a bike bag. The surviving three have reassembled to pay tribute to the terrific talent they misprized so disastrously. But grievances fueled by survivor guilt re-erupt. Was “Giggles” Gordon a miserable loser whose toxic imagination literally fueled the fire that consumed their “wee school”? Was his hand puppet Hugo a surrogate imaginary friend or a bad counselor? Or was he a now-sung genius created by the persecution that Alan, Fraser and Paul made possible? Were his feelings for Fraser a promissory note that should have been redeemed? Can magic be a kind of curse?
Nobody escapes childhood without a sense of betrayal, whether suffered or inflicted. Maxwell’s 150-minute drama is too honest to pretend that this aching, unappeasable debt can ever be exorcised. It’s enough that these four, very grounded pals fully suggest the huge gap between rambunctious schoolboys blind to the pain in their play and young adults who can regret what didn’t happen, what was never said, and what might have been. (You can clearly sense the influence of the monumental British T.V. series Seven Up in the play’s cunning contrasts.) Somehow “growing down” seems a better expression than the usual one.
Director Carlo Lorenzo Garcia has meticulously mapped out the play’s topography, especially the contrast between exuberant fairy tales and the gritty ground that nurtures them. The Scottish accents can be a burr too many, but the play’s ties that break are all our moments of truth.
photos by Ashley Rose
Our Bad Magnet
Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co.
Angel Island, 735 W. Sheridan Rd
Thurs-Sat at 8; Sun at 7
ends on April 26, 2015
for tickets, call (866) 468-3401or visit www.maryarrchie.com
for info on more Chicago Theater, visit www.TheatreinChicago.com
