By Carol Davis
SAN DIEGO — When I was a teenager, there used to be a donut store at the corner of my street. One of my girlfriends worked there after school. It wasn’t a Dunkin’ Donuts, it wasn’t Krispy Kreme nor was it Winchell’s Donuts. It was locally owned and operated, somewhat like the Superior Donut Store (without the coffee) in playwright Tracy Lett’s most current play, Superior Donuts now in a sugar sweet production at the San Diego Repertory Theatre under the careful eye of director Sam Woodhouse.
If memory serves, however, I never really looked at the ambiance, décor or even how many different flavors there were in my donut store as compared to the selected few in Letts’ piece. All I remember was that the aroma of freshly baked donuts was so overwhelming I knew that I could never work in a donut store without sampling each one. Any attempt of a part time job selling donuts and still maintain any credibility of being on a diet were quickly dashed.
The Superior Donuts shop of Letts’ play takes place in Chicago and its owner is Arthur Przbyszewski (Robert Foxworth) a fifty nine year old second-generation son of Polish immigrants whose father before him opened and grew the business in the diverse Uptown Chicago neighborhood.
Arthur is, what some might call, a remnant of the hippy generation. His hair is pulled back in a ponytail (it’s completely gray), gray beard and rimless glasses, and he wears a poncho like pullover over his tie die tee shirt and jeans (his lucky ones). He is also a peacenik who protested the war (went to Canada) and comes to and opens his shop only when he feels like it.
Looking at this establishment from the outside in, it’s stuck in the same time zone as when his father had the shop. It’s furnished with an assortment of non matching chairs and tables, patched red counter stool covers, an old fashioned radiator as the only visible place for warmth, metal venetian blinds on the store front and door windows and a cash register that was already dated in the 50’s. All this is perfectly designed by Robin Sanford Roberts.
We don’t get to see the Starbucks across the street that threatens his business, but we already know what that looks like. For the regulars and those still in need of a handout, Superior Donuts is well, the superior of the two.
Arthur’s Russian neighbor Max (Dimiter D. Marinov) owns the DVD store next door. They share a common wall and seem to be connected by a back room door. Max has been after Arthur to sell him the donut shop so he can expand his business. The day we meet them the donut store has been vandalized and graffiti is on the walls, glass is broken and the place is a mess.
The neighborhood beat police (DeAnna Driscoll is Officer Randy Osteen and Keith Jefferson is Officer James Bailey) are on the scene asking the usual questions of Max who is in the process of a rant that lasts at least ten minutes (half of it is in Russian). He is spewing all kids of racial epithets. He is one of the more colorful of the locals and the first one to find the damage.
Arthur is nowhere to be seen. When he does arrive at the shop he looks around non-plussed by the devastation done to his business. It’s almost comical. His energy level on the Richter scale in contrast to Max’s would be a zero to none. We come to learn that not a whole lot excites Arthur whose life, he proclaims “is full of derailments”.
And so it goes with Arthur who continues to do little to fix what mess he finds after the break in, until a blizzard wind outside whirls Franco Wicks (Anthony B. Phillips) into his shop. Young, black and bursting with energy and new ideas Franco is there answering the call to the sign in the window: ‘Help Wanted’. Arthur’s life will never be the same.
Tracy Letts, who received the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Awards for his August: Osage County last year calls Superior Donuts his ‘love letter to Chicago’. Unlike the family drama of “August” or the creepiness of an earlier work Bug, “Donuts” is funny, light hearted yet somewhat melancholy when one thinks of all the small ethnic stores that made up the personality of a neighborhood now gone to one size fits all.
Overall most seeing the show will remember the quick repartee, references to a Chicago that one might never have known not coming from the ‘windy city’ and the rich character study Letts gives us to honor and to look into the psyche of most of his peeps.
As for the darker side, Letts manages to sugar coat all the underlying negatives of Arthur’s life by revealing them in slow motion under M. Scott Grabau’s subtle lighting while navigating the package toward a predictable ending.
We learn that in Arthur’s otherwise average life there was a failed marriage, a daughter he hasn’t seen in six years, a Dad who was disappointed in his son and a bright but underestimated, afraid to take a chance lost soul hidden in the body of Arthur Przybyszewski. Even as we need to know about his past to understand his now, those scenes stop the play, almost sucking the intended light tone away.
Robert Foxworth has nailed Arthur perfectly with his soft voice barely exuding any energy by doing much of anything. The few times we even get a rise out of him is when he thinks, at Franco’s urging, that he might be able to hook up with Officer Osteen.
As for Driscoll’s part as Officer Osteen she’s all over it. She is so delightful and full of life that Arthur would surely be missing the boat if he continued in his paralyzed state of doing nothing. Both she and Keith Jefferson are able to step out of the stereotype bad cop/good cop and add a bit more humor to an already lightweight show.
At one point Arthur steps up to a challenge to defend his ‘boy wonder’ when trouble comes a’callin’ in the form of two thugs that are after Franco because of unpaid debts. This poses a serious and somewhat unbelievable departure from the passive Arthur we had come to know. Foxworth does credible work in convincing us he’s serious while Max’s nephew Kiril (Brian Abraham), a giant of a man, supervises fight scenes (James Newcomb) that spew too much blood and go on too long.
Like the wind force that pushed him into the donut shop, Anthony B. Phillips’ Franco is one bundle of energy. A newcomer to our theatre scene, this is one young man to keep an eye on. As Franco he shows an emotional range from edgy to funny to bright to downtrodden. The effect he has on his new boss gives Arthur hope for the future. The two play well off one another.
The other force to be reckoned with is Dimiter D. Marinov as Max Arthur’s ruthless and very opinionated neighbor. His rants and body language are one for the books oft time going so fast it’s difficult to hear what he has to say but that does not hamper our understanding of what he means. As the two punks coming after Franco, Luther Flynn and Kevin Magee (Steven Morgan- MacKay and Tyler Herdklotz) prove their worth with credible acting and Kathryn Herbruck’s Bag Lady is more window dressing than anything else.
The San Diego Rep has done justice to Letts’ new play with its strong ensemble acting and light handed touches. It’s well worth a trip downtown.
See you at the theatre.
Dates: Through March 6th
Organization: San Diego Repertory Theatre
Phone: 619-544-1000
Production Type: Comedy
Where: 79 Horton Plaza San Diego 92101
Ticket Prices: $29.00-$47.00
Web: sdrep.org
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Davis is a San Diego-based theatre critic
Venue: Lyceum Space