It didn't take a diviner to recognize Jeffrey M. Jones's 1990 play as a jilted spouse's "things-I-shoulda-said" list, with all the self-righteous bias implied thereby. It's now 2019, however, and so the smart young Louisiana-expats of the theater company making its Chicago debut have cleverly circumvented the distracting gender attributes once associated with the premise of a married couple spending a quiet Halloween evening with television and candy corn—oh, and intrusive holiday revelers, benign sheet-covered ghosts and mischievous masked demons. The couple, you see, are now both cast with female actors, while the physical and vocal features of the spooky creatures designated in the playbill as "Beast" and "Witch" are so distorted—by bloody zombie-makeup at times, by animal-skulls completely concealing their faces at others—as to render them androgynous. Thus, the marital conflict under scrutiny is revealed as a war, not of social privilege or foregone assumptions, but the erosive restlessness arising from petty annoyances after (as the saying goes) the honeymoon is over. As the title suggests, Jones's mansplaining is structured episodically, but it is also presented mosaically. We clearly hear the stage manager cue up the start of each individual scene, with the sequential arrangement soon giving way to random acts of unspoken motive, reflecting the author's failure at making a coherent case for how it all went kerflooey. Like most writing projects fueled by guilt and hindsight, too, his memoirs often veer into gratuitous swagger—Shakespearean repartee, robot raps, Emersonian poetry. The artists of Theatre L’acadie (whose motto is "If it doesn't make us uncomfortable, is it truly art?") never flinch from the challenge, but instead maintain a firm grasp on every enigmatic gesture or cryptic speech in what could have emerged merely a catalogue of grievances, keeping the anticipation level suspenseful, the pace unhurried, and the creepiness factor shifting between Hollywood horror and playful whimsy. (Theatergoers retiring to the lobby bar at intermission may expect to encounter the aforementioned goblins enjoying an in-character drink-and-mingle.)
