Photo by Justin Barbin
For its final show in its longtime home at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie (before its move to its own building in Evanston this summer), Northlight Theatre has served up an enjoyable little confection called The Angel Next Door, Paul Slade Smith’s translation of an old Hungarian comedy. Set in the 1920s, this play focuses on what one character disgustingly refers to as “theatre people” who find themselves caught up in a very meta set of circumstances that allow the hilarity to grow from the outset.
The first characters that we meet are a playwright couple, Arthur and Charlotte Sanders (Sean Fortunato and Katie Sullivan), led into their room by a sarcastic maid named Olga (Erin Noel Grennan, whose scene-stealing line readings permeate the show). They are accompanied by a young novelist, Oliver Adams (Garrett Lutz), whose first book they have optioned as a play they’ve spent months working on. In the first moments, we are treated to a whole lot of (mostly very funny) comments about how the playwright couple would handle the scene they are in if they were writing it as a play. (There is a lot of fun with where the fourth wall would be, a reminder that they are just joking, as the fourth wall is very real to them.)
Lutz’ character, who has apparently written the Great American Love Story in the form of an allegedly semi-autobiographical novel, reveals a secret he’s been hiding: that the object of his love (a Broadway singer named Margot Bell, played by Aja Alcazar) is more of a pen pal. She has no idea that he loves her and much less that he has written this literary masterpiece about their great love. The Sanders are completely freaked out: they have put a great deal of effort and time into their theatrical version of the book with the idea that Bell, who has been booked into an adjoining room, would play the lead on Broadway and now…what?
Complicating things further is the fact that, through the thinnest resort hotel walls in the universe, the three clearly hear Bell and a man she’s been romantically linked with in the past, singer Victor Pratt (Andrés Enriquez), enjoying a sexual affair with some of the most intentionally stilted and sappily delivered lines in history. (Just wait for how Pratt, whom we discover is unusually stupid, fawns on Bell’s lips. Enriquez pulls no punches in his portrayal of this good-looking idiot.)
The biggest problem? The sincerely-in-love Oliver is totally distraught by hearing this. He had thought he would make Margot a gift of his novel and then run off with her into the sunset. Or something. Now it seems that his novel is nothing but the foolish fantasy of a nerd in love, and he just can’t handle it. He wants to destroy the novel instead of publishing it, which of course would wipe out the play that the Sanders have written.
Got all that?
Linda Fortunato directs this farce with gusto on a set designed by Jack Magaw and lit by Christine A. Binder, arranging as much comically chaotic blocking as imaginable while most of the characters tackle their self-created problems and Olga starts actually enjoying herself, which comes as a surprise to her since it seems never to have happened before. Fortunato doesn’t miss a single one of Smith’s silly theatrical allusions, the result being that the audience is having fun on multiple levels at once.
This is a fun, supremely enjoyable, and overwhelmingly silly play and it’s a joy to watch Smith’s clever ways of extricating his characters from the messes he puts them in. It isn’t Shakespeare, but it’s a highly enjoyable way to spend an evening…or end an era.
The Angel Next Door is now playing at North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, through May 10. Tickets are available at northlight.org.