Drunken, damaged Tom is a needy, angry crybaby who just won’t shut up about how women have wronged him.
This is the last guy you’d ever want to meet at a bar.
It’s no different in a theater.
Promising area scribe Kelly McAllister writes himself into a corner on the first page of his angst-ridden and self-absorbed “Some Unfortunate Hour.” There’s no escape – for any of us – until its unpleasant but mercifully brief 75 minutes are over. At a party, ditching a fool like Tom might take hours.
Our sad sap has just signed his divorce papers. Now he’s found his way into an existential Denver dive bar to drown his miseries in whiskey and demonize his wife in drunken diatribes. He’s an arrogant intellectual rambler who clearly deserved whatever he got from “the woman who shall remain nameless.”
Tom (Dan O’Neill) is hardly an attractive protagonist. Since McAllister focused his play on someone exquisitely described as “poetically morose,” one can only assume he was working out some deeply personal issues.
Therein lies the noble and cathartic power of the art, but there’s a reason shrinks charge $75 an hour to listen to whining like this from pathetic guys like Tom – no matter how skillfully it is written (and it is). A play’s intended audience must exceed one: It’s never communicated what any of this has to do with the rest of us.
Far more interesting are the two women on the periphery, the bartender Janus (Karen Slack) and the aptly named Charity (Elgin Kelley), who’s so desperately lonely she practically insists on forging a connection with this wounded animal. Not a real or lasting one, just something to get her through the night. Poor dumb Tom can’t even get that right.
Nothing about this play feels real in its first-ever staging at the Avenue Theater. Not the unlikely, noir-ish banter between Tom and the bejeweled lady in red. And certainly not a clichéd artifice in which the “real” action either freezes or turns momentarily surreal while Tom engages the audience in a sort of smart-guy slam-poetry set against obtrusive sound effects.
The neat trick here is that Tom is so far gone, the action, like his mouth, seems to keep going even when he thinks he’s gone off to a private place.
There are sporadic attempts to hit upon that elusive greater truth all playwrights aspire to. At one point the women transform into “toil and trouble” witches to torment Tom with Rudyard Kipling’s virgin/
whore poem, “The Vampire,” about a man who’s been made a fool “by the woman who did not care.” There must be some meaning in having a bartender named after the Roman god of beginnings. And Tom even quotes Led Zeppelin.
In that way, the play is like a lot of late drunken nights in a bar. But unless you are Dylan
Thomas, most vaguely brilliant epiphanies realized in the stupor of the witching hour fail to stand the scrutiny of sunlight.
Director Martin McGovern has assembled a stellar trio of actors who bravely bare their souls in this sincere effort, most astonishingly Kelley, whose performance is peppered with lovely moments. The women are so much more compelling than Tom, one wishes the play were about either of them. A contemporary soundtrack featuring artists from Stephin Merritt to Robbie Gil is effective.
The title, by the way, references the moment Tom faces his inescapable culpability for the train wreck he’s made of his life – which should actually be his most fortunate hour. Unfortunately for us, it’s an hour we’ll never get back.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Some Unfortunate Hour” | * 1/2 RATING
DRAMA|Presented by The Other Theatre Company|Written by Kelly McAllister|Directed by Martin McGovern|Starring Dan O’Neill, Elgin Kelley and Karen Slack|At The Avenue Theater, 417 E. 17th Ave.|THROUGH NOV. 4|8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays (no performances Oct. 12-14)|75 minutes|$15-$20| 303-321-5925
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-John Moore
