Where the boys lack game—and inspiration

By Chris Jones | Tribune critic

2:16 AM EDT, May 19, 2008

Men fear intimacy and constantly feel threatened. This state of male being appears unconstrained by geography or chronology. Nonetheless, British males in the mid-1990s were particularly worried about their manhood. Or so the writers of the era would have us believe.

Most of the better-known macho-fear dramas from the era—Patrick Marber's "Dealer's Choice," Jeff Butterworth's "Mojo" and so on—made it rapidly across the pond to Chicago, a city that fears intimacy and constantly feels threatened and thus appreciates such plays.

The likes of Steppenwolf Theatre Company and the now-defunct Roadworks made a specialty of them. But "Not a Game for Boys," a 1995 play by Simon Block that's just now seeing its American premiere at Chicago's A Red Orchid Theatre, took a whole lot longer to arrive.

There is a good reason for that. It's not in the same league as those others.

Moreover, this play is all about table tennis (which you might prefer to call Ping-Pong). To one's irritation, this is one of those dramas wherein the action takes place in some potentially stimulating locale—in this case, amid a bunch of table-tennis fanatics in the middle of crucial match play—which the playwright elects not to show you.

So, no, you don't get to see celluloid flying and bats twirled by actors who've hastily taken a crash course in killer serves and spinning the ball. This drama, which involves the meltdown of a tawdry table-tennis team on the brink of relegation to a minor league, takes place backstage, so to speak, at a game. All you get to see of the actual sport is the actors' eyes shifting back and forth in their sockets.

Instead of real sport, we get two predictable middle-age characters and one younger one who take on each other as much as any opponent, as their league alternately becomes their refuge, escape and poison from various states of marital and other woman-driven miseries. All are recognizable sitcom types.

The actors have their moments—Dan Rivkin's Oscar has a pleasing sense of the pathetic, Nigel Patterson's Eric is amusingly inept and Bob Turton's Tony has flashes of the requisite intensity.

But Robin Witt's underpaced and overly gentile production mostly leaves the gloves on, which is unusual for this typically bare-knuckles theater.

Even though the antics of these dismal athletes are pathetic indeed, this production misses the intended squalor and desperation of the inner-city cultural environment, offering up instead somewhere that looks more like the gentile game room from "Fawlty Towers." There are supposed to be some laughs, sure, but not so much at the expense of veracity and drama.

The visuals are off. And while the show is harmless enough, the stakes just don't rise to the credible heights necessary for the piece to catch any kind of fire. Table tennis can be a matter of life and death. Here it's more like a trio of loser-guys who can barely get it over the net.

cjones5@tribune.com

"Not a Game for Boys"
When: Through June 22

Where: A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells St.

Tickets: $15-$25 at 312-943-8722 or www.aredorchidtheatre.org