10 Out Of 12

Or: Thank you, Dark

There is something about the theater, the ridiculousness of the art, that makes people want to dismember it. To look at the men and women behind the curtain and look at what goes into that light creating a little wedge of light, that momentous pause. Sometimes this exploration is cursory, from the obligatory backstage episode of case-of-the-week-type detective shows, to zany send ups such as Noises Off, to epic sagas like Slings and Arrows or Season on the Line. None I think have been so exhaustively exact as Anne Washburn’s 10 Out Of 12. Set in the tech week for a curious, overwrought victorian brood-piece, an ensemble of performers and technicians pace through the house and the struts of the unfinished set (an object de art in itself. Floating toast?)

While a splendid work of narrative horticulture (with driving constraints rather than plot, everything’s extraneous, and therefore nothing is) it’s hard to imagine that a lay person, someone coming to the theater to be, G-d help them, entertained, will be able to touch it. Washburn’s best writing and director Jeremy Wechsler’s clearest moments derive the headset banter and unseen heroics of the crew (“Safety Third!”) or in the uncomfortable stiffness of the usual horseradish directors and actors smear each other with, but all with a vocabulary or a subtextual dialect that takes many spent bright days in dark spaces working from can to can’t in a labor of collective worship to understand.

The trouble is the play’s purity to the process. True, none of the characters is much enthused by the process of am overwrought victorian brood-piece, but the accidents, confrontations and crises are individual, everyday things. Our attention flits everywhere, tethered to our seats and the kindly provided headphones. Aiming for the perfect, magical ensemble effect she achieved in Mr. Burns, Washburn overshoots: no part is extraneous and as a result everything is. Some of the more prominent designers (the Costumer Barbara Robertson, and the elder Electrician John Mahoney) aren’t in attendance, their reverent voices shambled by sound designer and audio engineer Joe Court and Ben Zemann to converse with their living counterparts. So our natural desire for narrative and look for point of focus falls on Paul (Stephen Walker).

Paul is the face of the production, a Chicago theater legend, the kind of performer who immerses themselves in every aspect of their character and considers every aspect the play. It’s a dedication and a commitment to excellence makes him hugely respected and inspires youth after youth to come tread the boards, but it deludes him into claiming the license to hijack the script, belittle his cast mates, seduce young actresses, and generally make himself a great big pain in the posterior. If this were another type of theater story we would be looking for Paul to turn up with a fly rope round his neck or a prop dagger in his heart. While often usurped by odd static prerecorded interior-monologue, Walker hits his actual lines right in the sweet spot, with a commanding voice and hopeless expression. His Paul only leans into his gross behavior because he wants his performance to be perfect and genuinely desires (hence the belittle meant and the seduction) that everyone else be perfect too. It’s highly uncomfortable, outrageously funny and pointedly piteous. He is matched in his commitment, if not, sadly, in his clout, by Siget the actress (Eunice Woods), who always commits to most intriguing malarky while the action of the play within the play is paused, and in one, unseen scene by the ASM (Erin Long) and the junior electrician (Riley Mcliveen). Right up to the puzzling but undeniably Washburn-y finale, 10 out of 12 remains a celebration of the art, an enshrinement of those days of chaos from which the world arrises.