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Tracy
Letts's Superior
Donuts is
a warm delightful evening of theater, one which leaves you with a
lovely fuzzy feeling as you step back out into the night.
Letts's previous effort, August: Osage County, which won
him the Tony and the Pulitzer last year, was a dark dramatic
tour-de-force; Donuts is gentler, lighter territory, a
comedic slice of American life. Pithy exchanges and
rapid-fire one-liners move the comedy-drama delightfully along;
the superb actors and their finely drawn if somewhat exaggerated
characters lend the play much of its intimate charm.
 Arthur
Przybyszewski (Michael McKean) owns Superior Donuts, a
small rundown shop in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood that he
inherited from his late father, a Polish immigrant fiercely loyal
to his adopted country. Arthur still wears a ponytail and a
weathered tie-dyed T-shirt, an aging hippie who has faded from
life like the color from his jeans. Resigned, afraid of
intimacy, he seems mired in stasis. That is, until a brash
young African-American named Franco Wicks (Jon Michael Hill)
swaggers into his shop looking for a job, and begins dispensing romantic
and business wisdom with infectious optimism. Hill is
ebullient as Wicks, forceful and funny; McKean with his restraint
is perfect foil. The ancillary characters, two policemen
played by Kate Buddeke and James Vincent Meredith, the racist but
bighearted Russian owner of the DVD store next door (Yasen Peyanov),
a loan shark (Robert Maffia), and an old lady (Jane Alderman) who
comes in daily for a donut, round out the cast.
Much
of the play is fueled by the relationship and rapport between
Arthur and Franco: the older man seems to have given up on life
itself, the
younger enthusiastic and upbeat. Arthur surprises Franco by
reeling off the names of ten black poets in quick succession, the
young Franco in turn gives him surprisingly insightful dating
advice. The two quickly become friends in spite of the
obvious differences that separate them. Franco is the
catalyzing force in the relationship and a symbol of hope, a
bright young man who has written a novel on a huge stack of pads
and notebooks. Its title: America Will Be, taken from
a line in the Langston Hughes poem
Let
America Be America Again.
When things take a turn for the worse, and the play reveals the
heart beneath the comedy, Arthur shows surprising reserves of
courage and moral fortitude: the two will have pulled each other
from situations that, separately, neither could have
conquered.
See:
Superior
Donuts Read:
Let
America Be America Again: And Other Poems, Langston Hughes
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theatre
broadway |
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