SECONDS WHICH SHOULD BE SKIPPED, NOT SPLIT

Within the messy, overwritten and frustrating new script, If You Split A Second, is a potentially interesting premise: In an instant of unthinking and reflexive violence a man can obey his demons; yet in doing so, he can destroy not just his future but the welfare of his loved ones.

Not that you didn’t know this already, but that revelation is hidden deep inside a whirlwind of excess exposition and jumbled chronology that constitute Dana Lynn Formby’s indulgent two-act world premiere at Pegasus Players. It’s a pointless tour-de-force for two actors — Stephanie Chavara and Dylan McGorty – who play six roles and three generations in this pell-mell play made all the more confusing due to rapid transitions.

McGorty depicts Mick, the designated perpetrator of so much mayhem. This troubled, tattooed Alpha male is a welder in Cheyenne, Wyoming who murders his sister’s boyfriend and in effect abandons his family when sent to prison. The violence is quickly passed over for less enlightening discoveries. Maddeningly, we never sense what choices Mick had other than succumb to his testosterone-fueled rage, either before the crime or when he leaves jail, when he continues the cycle of violence on his granddaughter’s fiancé. Saying you’re sorry isn’t enough. Anyway, with equal randomness, Mick’s wife marries his lawyer brother and takes over the two kids Mick forfeited when he killed on impulse.

With deftness and spunk to equal McGorty, Chavara plays Mick’s wife, daughter and granddaughter, reflecting representative responses to the reckless and impossible men in their love lives; but with the rushed delivery of diffuse dialogue that lurches from poetry-slam lyricism to hard-boiled, blue-collar small talk, the action and its sometimes contrived crises turns incoherent. What’s the point of so much irrelevant banter, like showy allusions to Pompeii’s destruction and the Yellowstone caldera? This play needs editing as plants do water. Ilesa Duncan’s stream-of-consciousness staging only emphasizes the novelistic abandon of a drama with too many narrators and no center to speak of.

photos by Andre Walker

If You Split a Second
Pegasus Players
Leo Lerner Theater, 4520 N. Beacon Street
scheduled to end on June 2, 2013
for tickets, call 866-811-4111 or visit    http://www.pegasusplayers.org

for info on this and other Chicago Theater, visit http://www.TheatreinChicago.com