Superior Donuts

DO THE WHITE THING Hill, left, and McKean, teach each other a few tricks.

Photo: Michael Brosilow

To answer your first question, no. Superior Donuts, the new play Tracy Letts has written to follow up his unexpected smash hit August: Osage County, does not in any practical way measure up to its Pulitzer-winning three-act predecessor, nor does it give you the feeling that the American theater has been resuscitated by EMT workers.

Excellent. Now that we’ve addressed that order of business, let me tell you about the dope new comedy that opened at Steppenwolf on Saturday. It was written by one of the company’s ensemble members, Tracy Letts, and it drips with the kind of soulful, energized sarcasm that has long characterized his work as an actor and playwright. And while it resembles a cocktail-napkin doodle more than a Picasso, this final play of the city’s 2007-2008 season is the first to make localized, contemporary situation comedy—that popular medium theater surrendered to television long ago—and top-drawer stage craftsmanship happen at the same time. The resulting treat is a low comedy any Chicagoan can get high off of.

Arthur Przybyszewski, played by the immaculately tattered Michael McKean, runs a shoddy donut shop in Uptown, a once-prosperous, then-decaying, now-on-the-accelerated-upswing neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. A burned-out boomer hippie, Arthur spends his days shooting the shit with the beat cops, slipping free long johns to the sweetly recalcitrant bag lady, smoking weed and reciting soliloquies in a randomly appearing spotlight. (Most are about his draft-dodging years or the burden of inheriting a donut shop from his Polish immigrant father.) When he hires as his new shop assistant a smart-aleck black kid who might be a great untrained, undiscovered novelist, embodied here by the criminally entertaining spark plug Jon Hill, Arthur is inspired to help the kid in any way he can. Turns out, this means protecting him from the mutilation-inclined hoodlums the kid owes twenty-six grand.

Superior Donuts is a boulevard comedy in the truest sense. It examines in earnest the small-fry adventures and misadventures of people you might observe in any mom-and-pop joint you stroll past. The risk that Letts and Steppenwolf take here, though, is using that dated-but-durable form as a prism to examine Chicago race relations, at least as they exist on the North Side. Ethnic heritage, skin color and the immigrant experience all loom large here. (Letts has written a pungent gem-role for Yasen Peyankov, who gnaws the building to its foundation as a Russian proprietor of a growing electronics store.) The dilemma this sets up is impossibly confounding. If any of the working-class joes here are portrayed as wizened oracles—and most of them are—the knee-jerk criticism is that the writing is condescending or romanticized. If they’re presented as vulgar stereotypes—and most of them are—the charge will be racial profiling.

Letts avoids this trap by maximizing the equal-opportunity exploitation and minimizing the victimhood. The playwright feels sorry for no one, and won’t allow us to, either. As usual, he chisels high-relief characters out of a salt lick, and stands back to let them do what they will. Each is a familiar Uptown silhouette behaving as expected, and most of their plotted outcomes are predictable. But the situations in which the characters find themselves involve hard luck or poor choices more than race. In fact, the crudest savage is the South Side bookie who appears to collect a debt in this North Side-centric work. (This mealy-mouthed greaseball is to Bridgeport what Mickey Rooney’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s character was to the Japanese.)

The sole disappointment is that the playwright had a swell instinct for a Chicago-based play and was scarcely given the chance to finish it. A first draft of Donuts barely existed when August: Osage made its fateful transfer to New York, which surely explains some of the stopgap storytelling techniques. Many of Arthur’s exposition-packed monologues feel like damage control, particularly in the heavily triaged second act. There’s an uncanny plot resemblance to the 1995 Paul Auster film Smoke. And the lady cop character played by Kate Buddeke is reduced to Arthur’s love interest; we know the man who created the Weston women is capable of more, given more time.

But here Steppenwolf allows Letts the comic slayer to flourish. This time last year the critical community did Letts no favors when we compared him unsuitably to everyone from Eugene O’Neill to Sam Shepard for a corollary no stronger than the fact that he wrote a fine play for the stage. But the sting, speed and marksmanship of the gimcracks his characters fire at each other recall a different kind of writer. Here I was reminded of fellow Chicago dramatists Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the similarly razor-sharp cynics who penned The Front Page.

Tina Landau, a director added to the project late in the game, gets no less than uniformly authentic performances and design from her team, particularly a gorgeously decrepit set from Loy Arcenas. Only the slightly jerky lighting shifts she and designer Christopher Akerlind use to smooth the potholes in a still-nascent script create distraction.

Even if it opened in a vacuum in which August: Osage never existed, Steppenwolf still would have cranked out the conversation piece of the season; its stage currently bustles with the kind of flavorful Chicago characters who don’t make it onto Chicago stages nearly often enough. But it’s not a play for all time; in terms of shelf life we’ve gone from King Lear to Norman Lear. Superior Donuts should thus be consumed before it gets stale. Like the sinkers that have been Arthur’s daily livelihood, you ought to get it while it’s hot, fresh and tasty.