Anyone who has ever been a part of storefront theatre in Chicago and witnessed its frequent backstage absurdity will find much to love and laugh about in Richard Engling’s The Very Last Production of King Lear, the third book in his satirical series about a tiny, struggling theatre and its talented (but often naive and extremely unlucky) artistic director, Dwayne Finnegan.
Having already directed, in the first book, an acclaimed (by those few who saw it during an record arctic freeze) production of Titus Andronicus on a shoestring budget and an impressive Romeo and Juliet also awash in comic intrigue, Dwayne sets his sights on the powerful and notoriously difficult King Lear.
With a much larger budget after Romeo, Dwayne’s Psychedelic Dream Theatre is invited to produce its next play in a time slot for smaller companies at the famed Goodman Theatre, which he naturally covets as an opportunity to give him and his people a much bigger platform. Of course, once again Engling unleashes a number of problems to derail it all. Chief among them is the company’s executive director/designer Ingrid, the secretive, van-living woman whose various capabilities keep the tiny theatre going and who is determined to create and use a fire trick on the Owen Theatre stage despite being told in no uncertain terms that it is not allowed. Everyone she mentions it to immediately brings up the devastating Iroquois Theater fire in 1903 that killed 602 people, but Ingrid (who has made a career out of quietly skirting rules she doesn’t like) is determined that she can make the effect happen in a safe and impressive way, and she will not be deterred.
This, of course, is not the only thing that Dwayne has to deal with. One of the significant aspects of this novel concerns making a living in theatre, and we see him moving among several different pedestrian jobs in order to stay alive while awaiting the huge break that he believes this King Lear to be. He has been able to keep going all this time because his wife Angela is a tenured teacher in the Chicago Public Schools; however, that may be in jeopardy: she has determined that it is time that they start a family and hopes to take a year off.
In addition to the machinations of Ingrid and his wife, Dwayne finds more (and more snippy) infighting among his cast than he’s accustomed to, from Peter, an equity actor who has played King Lear in the past and who believes that this production’s Lear doesn’t have the chops for such a complex role (and is not hesitant to voice that opinion); to the self-aggrandizing Rocky, who continuously gives poor advice to other actors; to the return of Bobby, a former leader of the company who had absconded to Hollywood with all of its money in the middle of the run-up to Titus.
Together with Joan, the company’s third and most realistic board member along with Dwayne and Ingrid, he needs to hold it all together while helping his cast to discover how to play their complex characters. No one needs him more than Wallace, his choice for Lear, who is second-guessing his worthiness for the role (due in no small part to the frequent harsh comments from Peter, who doesn’t even pretend to try to keep his voice down).
A lot of this third novel is set in locations other than the theatre, and the impact is that we find a more rounded satire even than before. Engling sets his sharp wit on, among many other things, incompetent or leering bosses (in this case Angela’s superiors at school); marital and non-marital relationships; problems (including more infighting) at the offices where Dwayne finds work, which include cold-calling would-be clients for Rocky, who is a personal injury lawyer in his non-stage life; fertility clinics and doulas, which in this case includes a very strange woman whose “techniques” for inducing pregnancy feel more like they come from a witch doctor than a modern expert; an actor whose alternative personality nearly killed someone in Titus and who is back once again, claiming to have it under medicinal control; and a multitude of other matters. We also get much deeper into the pasts and personalities of characters other than Dwayne, most of whom we have met in the earlier books. It all provides a wonderful palette on which Engling’s trademark humor can come alive.
Why no one ever explored the storefront theatre scene as a comic setting before is hard to understand, as Engling’s series proves that it is rife with all kinds of opportunities. This book may not be as laugh-out-loud funny as, say, Give My Regards to Nowhere, but it is nonetheless tremendously entertaining and a joy to read. My only complaint is that these short novels fly along so quickly that I don’t have time to linger in the silliness.