Lucinda’s Bed

Chicago playwright McCullough’s new work seems both highly personal and oddly impersonal. The emotional situations through which we follow Lucinda (a magnetic Laidlaw) in various stages of her life and relationships seem to emanate from an intimate corner of the writer’s psyche; Lucinda makes choices and mistakes so specific they feel as though they’ve been not just written but lived or observed. But the play’s conceit—that Lucinda is shadowed throughout her life by the Monster that lives under her bed—undermines the emotional impact by stripping Lucinda of her own agency. All of her disappointments can be blamed on a force over which she has no control.

More seductive than scary, the Monster takes the form of a handsome young man in a crisp dress shirt and fitted slacks (the normally compelling Neff, here strangely mechanical). He reappears in various guises from Lucinda’s girlhood through her courtship with and long marriage to the affably bland Adam (MacKechnie); if we had to guess (and we do, since the playwright leaves things watery), the Monster represents temptation and the allure of danger. But in McCullough’s uneasy wedding of melodrama and whimsy, the rules change too often. Any notion that the Monster is Lucinda’s psychological construct is negated by his one-time interaction with Adam. By the time we reach the overstretched ending, each character’s motivations are anyone’s guess. Grant Sabin’s scenic design allows Neff to make nifty entrances and exits; if only Hill’s lengthy scene transitions were as seamless.

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