A Guide for the Perplexed

Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, Chicago

(773) 871-3000

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Joel Drake Johnson’s new play captures a suburban home in “serious emotional disarray,” said Scott Morgan in the Chicago Daily Herald. Doug (Kevin Anderson), fresh out of prison, has reluctantly moved in with his sister Sheila’s family. When she goes away on business, he’s left to deal with her troubling husband and troubled teenage son. Doug’s brother-in-law Philip (Francis Guinan) has been fired for a white-collar crime he denies committing, while Doug’s gay nephew Andrew (Bubba Weiler) struggles with suicidal thoughts. In a series of “wonderful scenes,” the three actors gradually introduce the audience to every side of these “unhappy characters.”

Guinan’s “magnificent performance” is pretty much the only reason to see this otherwise meandering play, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Cut adrift and deeply shamed, Philip “fills his days with domestic minutiae—feeding tropical fish, ensuring that the patio door stays locked.” Watching Guinan as Philip discovers that he can’t really find an escape in such a mundane existence turns out to be surprisingly riveting theater. Unfortunately, Johnson seems to think that his play’s most interesting character is Doug—a puzzling figure who “seems to go from regular guy with an anger problem to full-on eccentric, and then back again with little discernible reason.” Neither the playwright nor the miscast Anderson seems to really understand this man.

When the audience first meets the aimless Doug, we presume the word “perplexed” in the title is meant to apply to him, said Steven Oxman in Variety. Johnson nicely upends our expectations—Doug in fact serves as a sort of emotional guide for the other characters, turning out to be, if not the voice of reason, at least a “confessor and a potential savior” as they work through their fears. Despite momentary “flashes of brilliance,” though, Johnson’s play suffers from a lack of narrative cohesion. Then again, that may be intentional: Perplexed is, after all, a meditation on how “nobody can rely on others for the answers, if there are any.”