Trevor

"Naked...lawless...with no one to applaud their tricks..." this is how Trevor characterizes the condition of chimpanzees in the wild. This somber assessment is spoken by the title character in Nick Jones' new play, a chimpanzee himself, formerly successful in show business, but, now, entombed in suburban Connecticut far from the bright lights. Trevor lives with Sandra, a middle-aged woman who claims to have purchased him from the trunk of a car at a local Walmart. Sandra is a widow; her husband, Jerome,formerly "the dominant male in the household," as Trevor ominously remarks, has died, although the chimp thinks that he has just gone away temporarily. Full-grown, weighing over 200 pounds, and increasingly agitated about this failed career in the entertainment industry, Trevor is an accident waiting to happen and the audience watches the spectacle of his enraged deterioration with mingled terror and pity. Ostensibly a comedy, "Trevor" packs a menacing punch. The actor playing the chimp is lanky and hops about the set acrobatically and we sense that he is powerful, disgruntled and a slow-burning fuse. And, of course, in the back of our mind lurks the story on which "Trevor" is based -- the tragedy of the trained chimp, Travis, also formerly a star of TV commercials, who ripped a woman's face off before being gunned down by local gendarmes, cops who had formerly stood in line to have their pictures taken with the charismatic primate. Jones' play is short, only about ninety minutes, and much of it is very funny. Trevor imagines himself a great Thespian, longs to be re-united with Morgan Fairchild with whom he once filmed a commercial, and grouses about contracts, his SAG dues, the sorry state of the TV and film industry that can't accomodate a talented primate of his kind and yearns to increase his acting range with some really serious parts. Sandra completely misunderstands the chimp as he misunderstands her -- in effect, the play consists of two monologues that don't really address one another: Sandra's perverse attempt, presumably based on loneliness, to turn the dangerous chimp into a human child, and Trevor's increasing rage at what he views as the collapse of his acting career. I presume that Jones' script is a sly joke on the acting profession, an argument that actors are self-absorbed monkeys, imitating one another, egotistical, self-absorbed, and, more or less, without a clue. This satirical vein in the play derives from a recent novel in which Cheetah, Tarzan's side-kick, narrates in the first-person a show-biz autobiography, "Me Cheeta, My Life in Hollywood. In "Trevor," the business about TV and film gives the chimp something to talk about, an intelligible, even, tragic backstory, and imparts to his final, fatal outburst of rage a thematic meaning -- the horrible stuff at the end is not just a primate outburst but an explosion of ferocity by an actor who feels unjustly ignored, insulted, and injured. Although this seems contrived, "Trevor's" plot mechanism actually works quite well and allows the animal to express himself in increasingly angry monologues. Of course, Trevor doesn't really understand what is happening -- when an animal control officer arrives and samples his blood, for instance, Trevor thinks that the man is a talent agent scouting him for a TV role. Although Trevor speaks fluent, Hollywood-inflected lingo, we see, as the play progresses, that he doesn't really understand anything being said about him -- to his ear, the human dialogue is nonsense words ("Chadda-chadda-chadda") in which are interspersed a few phrases, really just noises that he understands -- words like "No" and "good boy" and "eat." The play is a comedy of miscommunication and misunderstanding until the inevitable catastrophe at its end. Trevor's mentor is another renowned Chimp named Oliver, a part played by Colm O'Reilly. (O'Reilly played the role of the hunchback in "The Hunchback Variations" by the Theater Oobleck; that show was one of the greatest plays that I have ever seen and I was thrilled that he is in this piece.) Oliver is suave and wears a white tuxedo -- although like Trevor he's barefoot. He claims to have a human wife and half-human children and, even, a three-quarter human grandchild. He's an old industry pro who reminds Trevor that the first rule of animal acting is to not "poop yourself," an injunction that poor Trevor violates in the gruesome climax of the play (although in his delirium, he blames the offending turd on a trained seal that he imagines hovering nearby to thwart him). Oliver knows that show-biz has its ups and downs -- at one point, we learn that his human wife has divorced him and that his half-human children are being vivisected for medical research: "easy come, easy go" seems to be Oliver's attitude toward these reversals of fortune, an attitude that he can't persuade Trevor to adopt. Like most actors, Trevor is spoiled and narcissistic, as well as hyper-sensitive and neurasthenic -- the crying of a neighbor's baby drives him to madness -- and he doesn't accept Oliver's advice with ensuing dire consequences. More a situation than a play, "Trevor" doesn't really have a satisfactory ending -- but almost all of show is intense, funny, and terrifying. "Trevor" is a production of A Red Orchid Theater at 1531 N. Wells in Chicago, a block to the south of Second City. A Red Orchid Theater was the nest from which Michael Shannon hatched -- he is featured in the Theater's ads as its most famous alumnus. The theater itself is tiny -- "intimate" suggests too much space. The audience is seated in a cellar-like chamber the size of living room, forty seats all within 15 feet of the back of the set. There is no stage. The actors occupy the same terrain where the audience is seated -- in this case, everyone is edged up around a squalid kitchen and living room filled with mementos of Trevor's acting career and various primate toys. The acting space is very narrow and this creates some problems with blocking -- some of the action takes placed at the extreme edges of the acting space and, paradoxically, for such a minute theater, some of the play is hard to see. The audience walks in and out of the theater across the set where the monkey and his mistress cavort during the play and, as the show progresses, it's hot and we can see every bead of sweat on the actors, sometimes only four or five feet away. The space is ideal for this show -- it enhances the sense of menace, of being in a cage with a dangerous and wild animal.