The
template behind The Thrill of the Chase is a very familiar one. In this variation, two
friends for 20 years, since childhood, co-habitate in a swanky penthouse
apartment owned by the more dominant of the two, Charlie (Kevin O’Callaghan). The more submissive one, Nicky (Ryan
Barrentine), desirous of a more
grown-up life, announces that he's going to be married. This sends Charlie into
his Most Manipulative Mode and he both subtly and not-so-subtly embarks upon a
campaign to fuck up his friend's plans, not to mention the trust at the center
of his relationship with fiancé Izzy (Nicole Samsel), all in the guise of doing “what's best for him”
as a friend. There are far superior plays that contain this dynamic as a
feature informing larger plots, more interesting milieux and more layered
themes (Butley and Sleuth come to mind), but this is one of those LaBute-y,
youthy things in which people who are nominally adults spend time acting out
like adolescents, often in defiance of simple logic or a more reasonable “out”
option that isn't sufficiently blocked and begs questions starting with, “Well,
why doesn’t Nicky just…”
Granted,
British playwright Philip Gawthorne
is making a point about relationship politics, but it all rings hollow because
Charlie is so transparently a Machiavellian schemer (it doesn't help that the
charmless Mr. O’Callaghan virtually twirls his non-existent mustache, making
everybody else who doesn’t see through him patience-tryingly gullible) that he
has no credence; his is essentially a manufactured pathology. In reality, both
Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (and Charlie would have to be
best by at least one of them) are more insidious and improvisatory, and claim
an even higher emotional toll on the enabling family and companions they
target, because the abuse comes intertwined with genuine sincerity; the trap
is, the convictions of that sincerity are mercurial, and change as needed to
maintain power in the relationship. But that isn’t what happens here; mostly
Charlie is just a psychological bully. Subsequently you spend this
excruciatingly overwritten and way too
long play very aware of a dramatist laboring to keep the game alive under false pretenses.
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