Big Time
BIG TIME’ IS A GLEAMING LITTLE GEM SHEDDING LIGHT ON ‘ME’ GENERATION
Chicago Tribune. Chicago, Ill. Nov 13, 1987; Richard Christiansen, Entertainment editor. Paul, the leading character of “Big Time,” belongs to the fast-track crowd of young banker-broker-trader-dealers who flourished in the United States in the 1980s.
Whizzing about the world, troubleshooting on international accounts of “serious money,” flying home to relax with a beer and a quick snort of cocaine, he’s the yuppie prince supreme, about as far removed from the earnest working-class heroes of Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller as one could imagine.
But though he’s a major member of the gimme generation, Paul’s also an innocent. He loves his work, he fights for his woman, he believes in his future, he’s sold on success.
Then, on a trip to shore up a shaky financial situation in a Middle Eastern country, he has his faced rubbed in the global realities of America in the ’80s. He’s taken hostage, is frightened and humiliated by his captors, is at last released and comes home a shaken and desperate man.
All this takes place in 75 minutes in Keith Reddin’s new play, in a series of lean, urgent scenes that has been superbly directed, designed and acted by the Remains Theatre Ensemble in the Goodman Theatre Studio.
Reddin, author of such political-social satires as “Rum and Coke” and “Highest Standard of Living,” has not lost his bizarre sense of humor here. He has given Diane, Paul’s sleek, soulless boss, a monologue on the grisly deaths of her many relatives (spun out with chilling nonchalance by Amy Morton) that’s as dark and as funny as anything he has written.
But “Big Time” is a darker, deeper work than Reddin’s earlier plays. Stripped to essentials, much like the bleak vision of David Mamet’s “Edmond,” it’s a sad, savage look at a new lost generation of spoiled, self-centered Americans, sleek and corrupt in their enterprise, whose feelings of love and understanding have been starved out in their hunger for the sharp deal and the main chance.
“What would you die for?” Paul’s political zealot captor asks of him, and Paul cannot answer.
This lost hope is achingly personified not only in Paul-played in brilliant detail with swagger and charm, and delicate poignancy, by William L. Petersen. It is also present in his career woman lover Fran (Martha Lavey Greene), maddened by her failing feminism, and in his photo journalist friend Peter (Steve Prutting), who views a picture of rotting corpses as an object to be artfully cropped.
The play and its performances (notably in Alan Novak’s caricature of a toadying business functionary) sometimes are merely clever; the drama loses a little momentum during Paul’s imprisonment; and as well as Petersen and Morton enact the play’s final, bitterly ironic duet, I wish the action had ended with the scene that immediately preceded it, a monologue in the dark delivered with devastating loss and confusion by Petersen.
“Big Time,” in short, may need more work, more filling out. But its literary and theatrical excellence, delineated with surgical precision by director Larry Sloan, should not be belittled. This is a small play of smashing impact, in a polished production of great power.
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