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May 8--At one point in Don DeLillo's cold, elliptical and occasionally profound new drama, "Love-Lies-Bleeding," the adult son of a man reduced by strokes to a persistently vegetative state tells of wandering the aisles of a supermarket, looking for a turkey bag with which to suffocate his father. The plastic wrap is intended as a backup, should the morphine-induced, domestic-euthanasia scheme, which the young man has cooked up with his pop's talkative second wife, somehow does not work out.
"I did it with full awareness of the absurdity of the situation," says good-looking Sean, of his life-and-death odyssey there amid the Reynolds Wrap.
We've met a lot of characters like that -- arch intellectuals equal parts self-aware and in denial -- during the current season of avowedly anti-populist new works at the Steppenwolf Theatre. Tortured, overly articulate characters in language-driven plays now roam this stage as surely and constantly as did those angry, blue-collar guys with their more guttural yarns of two or three decades ago.
The relationship of this smart-mouthed, dispassionate and generally miserable crowd with life as it is lived is usually slightly suspect. And that's certainly the case with DeLillo's sometimes confounding latest, which is about as comfortable with conventional plotting as the superb actor Larry Kucharik must be playing the vegetative, older Alex, a wheelchair-bound man whose movements have been reduced to mere reflexes.
But in this case at least, they are worth 90 minutes of anyone's time, in part because this drama puts into play the oft-unspoken paradox that lies behind the debate on all aspects of assisted suicide. Religious conservatives, who believe that death brings peace and bliss, typically and ironically are against it, on the grounds that it usurps God's authority. Secularist liberals, equally ironically, tend to be for it, even though they suspect that death brings not a benevolent peace but an empty void. Which would logically mean any life is better than none.
In its best moments -- when it gets to the point -- that's what this play is fundamentally about. But DeLillo either resists or reluctantly backs into the delivery of certain bits of key information that would allow us to believe more in (and care more about) this incongruous little clutch.
Here, two absurdly different wives (one played with verbal ferocity by Martha Lavey and the other with cold dispassion by Penelope Walker) and one son (Louis Cancelmi) of an unseen third spouse, gather to decide what to do about a patriarch who apparently spent about one-tenth of his time as a visual artist and nine-tenths complicating the lives of those who (maybe) love(d) him.
This is such a frosty crowd that credibility is constantly and intentionally threatened. "You know things about him that I never knew," eulogizes the last wife in one of the play's flash-forward scenes to Alex's memorial. "This means nothing to me."
Right. Just what you'd say at a funeral.
Still, if the Terri Schiavo circus taught us anything, it's that euthanasia is best explored with glancing blows. DeLillo probes some of the same issues as Brian Clark's 1978 play "Whose Life Is It Anyway?," but he wisely resists the tropes of the issue drama. "Love-Lies-Bleeding" is only partly about the morality of euthanasia. It's just as much concerned with issues of interpersonal dominance. "Men who don't know themselves have a power over others," observes Walker's wife, in one of the play's numerous sudden nuggets of wisdom, which disappear as fast as they arrive.
Amy Morton's production is an apt match for this script -- a high compliment. Despite being stuck in the woefully underwritten part of prestroke Alex, John Heard is especially good. This well-known movie actor is a fascinating, Clintonian actor, who dances deliciously on the knife's edge between intellectual sophistication and old-fashioned sleaze. In a play in danger of debating itself to death, his articulate inarticulation adds badly needed humanity.
Lavey dominates the play, not least because her endlessly verbose character has most of the lines. This makes it even tougher to believe that Cancelmi's less-certain Sean is the one moving things forward on the mercy-killing front (which, weirdly, involves not at all the man's actual doctors). But Lavey, who here resembles a coiled spring, is a sight to behold. She consumes and spits out DeLillo's heady, restless, desperate lines like they're pills she needs to keep herself both in control and alive.
"Love-Lies-Bleeding"
When: Through May 28
Where: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $25 at 312-335-1650
cjones5@tribune.com
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