Nagle Jackson's "White Room' at Hedgerow

How would you function without the one material possession you couldn't live without? Now imagine a couple who've built their entire lives around the goods they possess, only to arrive home after an afternoon at the opera to find their apartment plundered of every object, right down to the roller pin that holds the toilet paper in place. How would these people respond?

This thought experiment forms the premise of Hedgerow Theatre's world premiere of Nagle Jackson's The White Room. When the book editor Paul (Steve Kuhel) and interior design consultant Jess (Leigh Murray) return to their empty three-room Chicago apartment (satisfyingly rendered by Zoran Kovcic's set), she first believes "this must be a joke."

Their philosophical claims adjuster, Rothschild (played by Kovcic), offers Biblical reassurance while trying to evaluate the "ultimate adjusting experience" of putting a value on their entire lives. Later a giant clown named Featherstone (Ed Swidey) bursts through the door, eventually informing them that he has their stuff. It soon becomes clear that Rothschild is a metaphor for God and the prankster Featherstone a stand-in for the Devil. Both battle for the souls of this yuppie couple, offering either spiritual redemption or materialistic humiliation.

Undeveloped themes

Jackson draws early parallels between materialism and spirituality: Jess recalls that she never attended church after her mother's car was repossessed on a Sunday, and she recounts designer names like counting beads on a rosary. But unlike his Taking Leave, which seamlessly blends a father's battle with Alzheimer's into a modern updating of a King Lear plot, this much shorter new work skimps on a full development of his themes. We never see a decline or shift in Paul and Jess's relationship. (After the burglary, Paul buys a gun, but who wouldn't?).

Swidey plays his devil with menacing candor, but Kovcic as Rothschild can't even deliver his jokes properly. Jackson's script compounds Kovcic's problem, failing to establish Rothschild's character and filling his speech with awkward phrases ("I've heard tell") and an intolerably inexhaustible selection of literary references.

Struggling actors

As the yuppies, Murray and Kuhel score on the easy humor—the nicknames they give the neighbors— but Murray can't differentiate her fear from exasperation, and talks about her missing print with a valley-girl "duh" inflection on the word "Klee." Kuhel, stuck in every scene with her, struggles mightily. But the cast's biggest burden is Jackson's heavy-handed script, which ultimately wrecks his God-Devil metaphor by turning the ending into a simple quest for revenge.

Even Jackson's intriguing original premise—how would a couple move forward after losing all their possessions?— condescendingly presumes that no one can find genuine fulfillment in things. I attend the theater five nights a week, but sometimes slipping my arms into a suit tailored to fit the contours of my physique can be more uplifting.

Hey, Jackson: You think you'll shame your audience out of the nasty petty pretentiousness that you despise? Good luck to you. No one in any audience believes they're these people to begin with.

Holden Caulfield was a teenager when he took aim at phonies. What's Jackson's excuse at 73?