Superior Donuts
Steppenwolf Theatre
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At this time last year, critics were comparing playwright Tracy Letts to such legends as Eugene O’Neill and Sam Shepard, said Christopher Piatt in Time Out Chicago. Letts’ powerful drama August: Osage County had just opened at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre; it would eventually win both the Tony Award for Best New Play and the Pulitzer Prize for drama. That sets the bar a bit too high for Letts’ follow-up, Superior Donuts. This tale of a decaying uptown Chicago doughnut shop struggling against the forces of neighborhood gentrification is significantly smaller in ambition than the epic August. Yet it has the marks of the playwright’s sharp, darkly comic sensibilities. “Even if the play opened in a vacuum in which August never existed, Steppenwolf still would have cranked out the conversation piece of the season.”
Letts’ essential goal is the same in both plays, said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. “To render the American dream in all its tattered contemporary reality.” Superior Donuts may be more pedestrian that its somewhat melodramatic predecessor, and the characters sometimes “feel like they’ve been pressed from pre-existing molds.” But the energetically charged dialogue is delivered by a superb cast. Michael McKean gives a marvelously natural performance as the shop’s owner, Arthur Przybyszewski, an aging radical who has completed his dropout trajectory by taking over the family doughnut shop. As Franco Wicks, Arthur’s energetic young African-American new hire, Jon Michael Hill possesses “enormous charm and bravura timing.”
The dynamics of the relationship between Arthur and Franco drive the play, but sometimes “feel dated and a little contrived,” said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Franco helps pull Arthur from his decades-long, marijuana-induced slumber, while Arthur helps Franco protect himself from a group of neighborhood thugs. Their interplay, both funny and socially pointed, is reminiscent of characters from the 1970s television sitcoms of Norman Lear. Superior Donuts is a surprisingly slight work from such a major talent as Letts. But, then again, major artists “rarely develop in a strictly linear fashion,” and I suspect this playwright has a few more masterworks in him.
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