In theater jargon, the term "vehicle" indicates a play or production designed to showcase the talents of a particular artist, often — but not always — at the expense of other dramatic factors (plot, character, plausibility, etc.). Brett Neveu's conveyance for Chicago icon Kate Buddeke meets this definition, but his efforts to impose a second agenda thereupon encumbers Her America with unnecessary baggage. Our setting is a home basement overflowing — like most such storage spaces — with the detritus of its residents stretching back generations. Its sole occupant is a woman of indeterminate age, discovered to be the mistress of the house, but presently bunkered down against invasion by a pack of aggressive dogs. As she cowers in fear and confusion, occasionally peering out the ground-level window at her pursuers, she takes comfort from the surrounding welter of family artifacts and the memories generated thereby, which she recounts to an unseen, perhaps imaginary, companion whose location is gradually localized to a large steamer trunk. No, this is not one of those body-in-the-box thrillers, although we might be forgiven that assumption, given the propensity of fiction writers in the last three decades to portray lower-middle-class citizens as uneducated, immoral, meth-and-moonshine-crazed troglodytes. Neveu's flyover-country damsel in distress is no murderer — indeed, has always obediently accepted her lowly status and restrictive options — but in a gallant attempt to generate compassion for her plight through affixing blame to social conditions, he has created a persona not so much a human being, possessing a distinct personality, as a catalogue of stereotypical experiences compiled from media images of rust-belt refugees just recently brought to popular attention. Neveu's intentions are admirable, but his full-out weep-for-the-innocent-poor campaign succeeds only in sentimentalizing those he would ennoble. That task falls to Buddeke, who reaches beyond the checklist text — further muddied by the author's ambivalence toward abusers and enablers alike, hackneyed diatribes aimed at the usual religious, economic and domestic brainwashes and a curiously anticlimactic Big Revelation — to endow her Kmart-clad heroine with dignity and pathos. If this necessitates occasionally slipping into emotional excess (a hazard catalyzed by Lindsay Jones's incidental score and overamplified use of Aerosmith's "Dream On" ) under the collaborative guidance of Linda Gillum, the resulting 70 minutes in this Solo Celebration welcome of a new year never cease to engage — and maybe even enlighten — audiences too long ignorant of their fellow travelers.
