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Following a Christmas Eve she could not have imagined, Rachel (Ericka Kreutz), on the lam from a hit man hired by her husband, asks, “Do you think we ever really know people?”
It’s a legitimate question, one she struggles with throughout Craig Lucas’ 1988 play Reckless, currently onstage at the Cincinnati Playhouse. It’s also a question for audiences: During the Reckless intermission, I heard a half-dozen people say, “I have no idea where this one is going.” They were laughing at the same time.
Unexpected plot turns are not a bad thing. Unpredictable plays are fun to watch, and that’s how I’d describe Reckless.
Rachel is one of the zanier characters onstage in Cincinnati this season, and Kreutz’s portrayal of this non-stop talker who loves Christmas and never sees the darker side of life is full of laughs, despite a “reckless” life. (My dictionary defines that word as “heedless of the consequences of one’s actions or of danger; incautious; rash.”) It typically means someone who is a daredevil, but not Rachel; she’s more a victim who careens from one odd situation to the next.
After moving in with Lloyd (Jim Wisniewski) — an oddly disconnected man she meets while fleeing — and his paraplegic wife Pooty (Erin Noel Grennan) — who fakes being a deaf mute — Rachel begins to see a series of psychiatrists (all played by Amy Warner, each of six funnier than the previous one). Rachel describes the twists and turns of her new life as a dream, one her analysts try to help her understand.
She has realized “I can be anybody,” and that takes her through a roller coaster of wild incarnations as she tries to sort out just who she is.
Rachel’s “dreams” take on vivid if unbelievable reality: She becomes a contestant on a game show, Your Mother or Your Wife. She works as a secretary in an office where money is being embezzled. She believes she is suspected of murder. She becomes homeless and mute. She eventually finds a kind of peace.
That’s enough to be said: Part of the fun is how Rachel’s life takes crazy 180-degree turns, catching you totally by surprise. The sentiment I heard at intermission was surely the playwright’s intention.
The Playhouse program gives us an essay by Lucas that cites some wisdom from pioneering psychotherapist Carl Jung: “Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.” Lucas extends the thought: “To which I might add: especially one’s self.”
That’s pretty much how you’ll feel after Reckless — after a wild comic ride, do you understand Rachel? Does she understand herself? I doubt it. That open-endedness is a fascinating dimension of this play.
Reckless is also simply fun to watch. Kreutz is a brilliant comic with a rubbery face and a flexible physical presence. The actors around her are all foils to her comic action, and they do a fine job, too, although most roles are one-dimensional, appropriate to a dream. They’re all caricatures, albeit odd ones. Using dreamlike logic, they all fit together, even though everyday reason would say what’s going on makes no sense.
The Playhouse has given Reckless a fine physical production, rivaling A Christmas Carol in terms of the use of trap doors to elevate scene changes. That adds to the show’s dreamlike fluidity (except when a trap fails to work, as happened momentarily on the production’s opening night). The set is a blizzard of Christmas lights, and the sound design is full of slightly off-kilter arrangements of Christmas music.
As the show ends, Rachel wanders upstage to the final line of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” — “if only in my dreams.” Reckless is not likely to become anyone’s favorite holiday show, but it has a zany spirit all its own. Grade: B+
RECKLESS, presented by Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, continues through April 6.
This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2007.
