In order for me to compare Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts unfavorably to his Pulitzer Prize winner, I would have to have seen or read August: Osage County. Since I haven’t done that, I have to take Superior Donuts on its own merits. Oh well.
Steppenwolf’s Superior Donuts takes place in a small, old mom-and-pop donut shop in Uptown. Since the place was opened in 1950, the neighborhood has changed and there’s now a Starbuck’s across the street. The owner is Arthur Przybyszewski (Michael McKean) – a lost, aging hippie who inherited the shop from his parents. As the play opens, his shop has been vandalized and the word “pussy” spray-painted on the wall. It could be neighborhood kids or it could be a disgruntled ex-employee. Arthur doesn’t much care. He avoids conflict. He avoids any emotional involvement with other people. It just causes trouble.
Arthur isn’t outraged at the vandalism, as is his neighbor Max Tarasov (Yasen Payenkov) – a hilariously volatile, non-PC Russian electronics store owner who wants to buy the donut shop to enlarge his own store. Arthur doesn’t pick up on the hints that one of the beat cops, Randy (Kate Buddeke), would like a more intimate relationship with him. And Arthur doesn’t know what he’s in for when he hires a hyper-literate black kid named Franco Wicks (Jon Michael Hill) to work for him.
I won’t go further into the plot, which some critics have sneeringly compared with Chico and the Man. It isn’t Norman Lear. What it reminded me of more than anything was the type of Chicago plays produced in the seventies at the then storefront mom-and-pop theatres like the St. Nicholas, Victory Gardens, Steppenwolf and Organic. It’s a successor to Bleacher Bums, E.R., American Buffalo – plays with a Chicago sensibility about believable people and how they cope with their lives. Arthur has monologues describing his childhood in Chicago, when families would spend hot nights sleeping outdoors in the park and how, when you were in the family car driving down the expressway and you saw the giant neon Magikist lips, you knew you were home. (This is the first time I have ever heard an audience go “Mmmmm” in agreement. Loudly.)
Michael McKean is terrific as Arthur. His weary resignation and fatalistic sense of humor are sharply defined. Jon Michael Hill is explosive as a ghetto kid whose burning intelligence and literacy is in contrast to character flaws which have a dire consequence for him. He has an extremely Chris Rock delivery of punchlines, but it works for him. Yasen Payenkov, Kate Buddeke, James Vincent Meredith (as Randy’s partner – a devout Trekkie), Robert Maffia (a local bookie with ulcers) and the rest of the cast are all spot-on.It addition to getting huge laughs, the play in its more serious moments gets audience reactions I have rarely heard – sharp gasps of horror and short moans of commiseration. This also has one of the most brutal and certainly the longest fistfight scene between two men you will ever see on stage. Tina Landau’s direction is never less than clear, sharp and in the service of the script.
This is one of those plays that will definitely go to New York, become a hit and in five years all the community theatres in this area will be producing it. So instead of standing there with a finger up your nose saying, “What’s that? I never heard of THAT!” when your play reading committee recommends Superior Donuts four years from now – why don’t you just go see it now and find out what it is?
It’s funny, it’s heart-breaking and it’s all Chicago.
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