Find an event
Diversey Harbor
Even the most ardent Broadway enthusiasts couldn’t tell you much about New Faces of 1952, a charming-but-disposable revue that was meant to showcase hitherto undiscovered stage talent. While New Faces isn’t regarded as literature that deserves revisiting, most will agree that the careers it launched—Eartha Kitt and Carol Lawrence were in the cast, and a writer named Mel Brooks contributed sketches—made the effort worthwhile.
Diversey Harbor, Marisa Wegrzyn’s very charming and very slight one act of North Side ennui, is a vehicle of a similar make and model. Her four-monologue play, about a quartet of postundergrad yet-to-wells all tangentially linked to the same murdered girl, gives you a taste of a clever young writer and the ambitious theater company she works with. You’ll be hearing from all of these parties in the future, so you’ll have to forgive that this remount of Harbor, which debuted on a double-bill in 2007, is hampered by shoddy design and a space slightly too large for Wegrzyn’s bite-size mystery.
Originally paired with David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago (from which it’s thankfully been freed), this 70-minute puzzle shows off Wegrzyn’s dryly observational worldview and four scrubbed new faces; the earnestness in their performances is more than welcome. They’re also partially swallowed up by the acoustics of the Greenhouse Theater’s main stage, backed by a cheap cardboard Chicago skyline, and at times obscured by amateurish technical cues that carry a whiff of collegiate theater. Also, while the evening is a pleasant diversion, the repeated, now-dated references to MySpace have the unintended effect of reminding you that theater can’t keep a social pace with the Internet.
