“Superior Donuts” is a crowd-pleasing buddy play about two 21-year-old men facing daunting adversaries, from which the only apparent escape is to run.
But one of them isn’t 21 and crossing into Canada to evade the Vietnam draft anymore. Arthur is now 65 and still “dropping out” of life — until he hires a young black man named Franco to help run his decaying north-side Chicago doughnut shop.
As their unlikely if inevitable friendship grows, we learn that Franco is in a similar kind of pickle. But Arthur has his back. Can redemption be far behind for an old hippie who’s been running in place his entire life?
Now if that’s what Tracy Letts’ play were truly about — manning up and taking responsibility for your demons and dubious decisions — he would have, well, a much better play.
Instead, he’s turned out a scattershot, heartfelt dark comedy that’s like a doughnut with a lightly burned exterior, but is all gooey on the inside.
Which is not to say the Denver Center Theatre Company’s opening-night audience didn’t scarf it up like a dozen-to-go with chocolate, glaze and sprinkles on top.
It’s a given that the wonderful performances by the ponytailed silver fox Mike Hartman (as Arthur) and magnetic newcomer Sheldon Best (Franco) — with brave support from Kathleen M. Brady as a bag lady and Jeanne Paulsen as a tomboy Irish cop — are genuine. It’s just that the play they’re performing in never feels completely genuine.
It’s introduced as a potential culture-clash powder keg: Arthur is the son of a Polish immigrant whose doughnut shop has been ransacked. Max (Robert Sicular) is a gruff Russian who owns the DVD store next door and blames black punks for the crime — right to the face of the neighborhood’s black cop and his Irish partner.
Into this racial stew comes Franco, an energetic aspiring novelist with big financial ambitions that completely contradict his seemingly unambitious willingness to mop Arthur’s floor for $8 an hour.
But David Mamet “Race” territory, this is not. This is a standard sitcom with a heart of gold and an eye-rollingly cliched villain.
As Franco, Best is given one precocious, quippy thing to say after another, which has the audience eating out of his hand. But it also makes the play feel more like an episode of “Chico and the Man” than a serious exploration of the unfair social disparities that mean a smart, goal-oriented black man like Franco will probably never make it out of this ‘hood.
Audiences will never be able to reconcile this play as coming from the same hand that penned the acidic, Pulitzer-winning family classic, “August: Osage County.”
The premise is an implausible hurdle. Playwriting 101 says you put two disparate strangers in a room so they can discover they have more in common than they realized. It’s been done a thousand times. When it feels natural, it’s “Harold and Maude.” When it feels manipulated, it’s “Superior Donuts.”
The play is also awkwardly structured so that Arthur, a clumsy man of few words, speaks directly and openly to the audience between scenes. This is a forced writing tactic that allows him to impart his back story to us without it having to come out organically.
It’s a treat to watch Hartman take on these narrative challenges, especially for his ability to play vulnerability and regret like a scared 10-year-old in an old man’s body. But there’s also a story going on here, and these monologues are momentum-killers.
At one point, the bag lady says: “You never see the bad stuff coming.” Only here, you see the bad stuff coming a mile away. Never in the history of storytelling has a writer character ever handed over a manuscript with the caveat, “That’s my only copy,” only to have that manuscript not come to some untimely demise. Never.
And when John Hutton walks on as a kind of blithely compassionate mobster, the play turns into a weird kind of David Cronenberg parody that culminates in an extended, awkward and, worse, seemingly unnecessary fight. When one of the pugilists pulls out a foam stick that he thuds off the overly cushioned rib pads worn by the other, the audience starts to snicker (and that’s not what they were going for, folks).
Apparently, Arthur finally has his Vietnam: A cause worth fighting for. But is that what we should be rooting for here?
“Superior Donuts” touches on gentrification, racism, the transformative power of friendship and many more topics than it ever needs to. It’s a play with a lot of synapses firing, but not so many receptors.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Superior Donuts” **1/2 (out of four stars)
Dark comedy. Presented by the Denver Center Theatre Company at the Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex. Written by Tracy Letts. Directed by Bruce Sevy. Starring Mike Hartman, Sheldon Best, John Hutton, Jeanne Paulsen and Kathleen M. Brady. Through April 30. 2 hours, 30 minutes. 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays; 7:30 p.m. Fridays; 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays. $10-$67. 303-893-4100 (800-641-1222 outside Denver) or
