Kimberly Katz' Platinum Press

I enjoyed this piece about an upper middle class family in Glencoe struggling to welcome an errant family member home after his five-year stint in prison.

Tony nominated actor Kevin Anderson plays Doug, the black sheep of the family and does a great job portraying the wild mood swings a person might experience trying to fit in and accommodate alienated family members as he adjusts to the basics of having a nice place to sleep again, nice food to eat and nowhere else to go. Kevin, who is originally from Gurnee Illinois, is well cast in the role and has a good sense of comic timing. Now at age fifty, he has the depth and road weariness to make you believe he is the disoriented, loser of this well educated, moneyed family.

Francis Guinan also gets high marks for his role as the neurotic, out of work, ineffectual father figure. Guinan’s high strung, detail oriented performance made me actually squirm in my seat with its authenticity. I was waiting for his character to explode, which he does finally when he discovers his precocious genius child has purposely killed all his exotic fish.

I also enjoyed Cynthia Baker’s portrayal of her character “Betty”, a cougar who has been writing to Doug while in prison and who desperately and futilely tries to win his affection and trust by showering him with expensive gifts and unconditional love but to no avail as he bluntly reminds her over and over, “I’m not going to f-ck you.”

Kudos also to set designer, Jeff Bauer, who has designed a sumptuous, spinning set that really makes you feel you are inside and on the patio of a gorgeous Glencoe million dollar home on the edge of a forest preserve.

The luxury and beauty of the home are also quite sterile in the way that many of these homes are and serves to exemplify the main theme that no matter how nice your home,

if you aren’t happy inside it, you might as well be back in prison - prison of another kind.

The feeling of isolation in the home with it’s track lighting and vaulted ceilings, completely surrounded by trees also serves the play in that each family member are so lonely themselves, that just having Doug’s presence there in this big house is a welcome, distraction, kind of like welcoming home a new puppy. They are eager to play with him (Doug) but desperately afraid he will metaphorically crap all over the house and their lives.

There are a few problems with Joel Drake Johnson’s script that only he can iron out - places where the monologues are not cut properly and cause these fine actors to struggle to make them sound natural and believable.

Overall though, I think that the Chicago families who attend theater at Victory Gardens are very much like the one in this play and will see themselves in it in a new and ultimately positive light.

*photo by Liz Lauren - Kevin Anderson (left) and Bubba Weiler