Tracy Letts' comedy, Superior Donuts, has a distractingly large hole in it, but at
GablesStage in South Florida the performances are enough to make for a pleasant couple of hours at the theater. Funny and sweetly touching, it goes down at easily.
The play debuted in 2008 (GableStage sets it in 2009 and 2010), the year Letts won the Pulitzer for August: Osage County, and it is sort of a two-act mini opus to that magnum opus.
It's also a paean to multiethnic Chicago.
A stick-in-the-mud 60ish son of immigrants (dad from Poland, mom from Russia), Arthur unimaginatively runs the Superior Donuts shop he inherited from his father. There's a Starbucks nearby, but not even a radio -- and sometimes not even coffee at Superior Donuts. An ambitious 49-year-old Russian, Max, in America more than a decade, owns the DVD shop next door and has plans to expand into electronics, but Arthur's place is in his way.
Along comes an eager, 21-year-old black guy, Franco, who persuades Arthur that the doughnut shop could be a happening place with the addition of a little music and some poetry readings. Franco already has written what he's sure is the next Great American Novel and asks Arthur to read it and to be careful with it because there's no backup copy to his roughly bundled stack of paper. That's the distraction. Not only are we waiting for what we're sure is a manuscript-related tragedy, but we're wondering why Franco, who has dropped out of college, didn't at least use a campus computer lab while he was to back up at least something. It intrudes, but not as badly as it might, thanks to top-notch production values.
Joseph Adler directs a surefooted cast on a pitch-perfect set by Lyle Baskin stools at a countertop, tables for four near the door, photos of baseball players on the walls and black-and-white linoleum on the floor, all looking decades-old drab.
Regulars into this holdover are a bag lady and a couple of good-hearted, if cartoonish cops. Muscling in are a bookie and an enforcer -- both Irish, we're told. The fight between paunchy Arthur (Avi Hoffman) and the younger and taller bookie (Gordon McConnell), as choreographed by Paul Homza, can induce real concern for the actors as bodies go flying across the stage. Arthur still wears tie-dyed T-shirts, but soliloquies make it clear the aging hippie is no stranger to depression, and Hoffman's rendering of Arthur's reminiscence of parenthood could break hearts: "I didn't know you had to have hope to raise a child."
But what Arthur lacks in hope abides in Franco, played by Marckenson Charles in the latest of several impressive performances, and Max, played by Chaz Mena, who enlivens the proceedings with every entrance.
