To know a society, Dostoyevsky wrote, one must look inside its prisons and hospitals. Modern addendum: and drive a cab. Playwright Will Kern has done just that; his eight-month stint hacking it in Chicago gave fruition to a short, pungent, bittersweet play whose title, Hellcab, sums up its point-of-view. A series of blackout vignettes, Hellcab depends on raw, earthy dialogue and deft acting to show the truth of life on the mean streets of a big American city today.
Hellcab, which has been playing successfully in Chicago for the past four years and benefits from having the original actors in its West-Coast cast, takes place on an achingly cold night at Christmas time. The skilled Paul Dillon, a gaunt, wounded, edgy soul ("Look at me -- I'm Satan's cabbie") plays the man behind the wheel, trying to cope with the assorted druggies, drunks and crazies who hail him as he shuttles back and forth between South and North Chicago. Dillon's fight is two-fold: to make a living and to keep his spirit and sanity from being shredded by the millstones of urban reality.
Six other equally-talented actors play a variety of quick-change roles: everything from cynical Don Juans and inebriated matrons to sinister loners oozing the threat of violence. Race underlies much of the play's tension, but mostly the problem is existential: what can an individual do in the face of all that pain, madness and inhumanity out there? Kern has an answer, not a solution: laugh at it when you can. That's what he makes the audience do, much of the time, and he even finishes on a note of hope; it's faint and small, but resonates movingly nonetheless.
