Review By Rick Pender

(L-R) Jeremy Dubin, Brian Isaac Phillips and Amy Hutchins provide comic highlights in CSF’s A Chance of Lightning.

Several experiments are underway at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival (CSF). While they might not be turning out quite as imagined, they're worth paying attention to nonetheless.

Joe McDonough's new play, A Chance of Lightning, is about an experiment gone awry. Medical research by a brainy but idealistic physician, Benjamin Kaufmann (Jeremy Dubin), has yielded a mutated virus that could be used as a potent lethal weapon. While he struggles to keep a lid on it, people with a variety of agendas, ideologies and causes try to get it for their own purposes.

But McDonough's play itself is an experiment, the first full-scale product of The CSF Studio, an innovative concept established a year ago. Through the studio, funded by a grant from the Cinergy Foundation, CSF has used its full-time actors to refine a play the company commissioned last summer. For its inaugural outing, CSF worked with McDonough, best known locally as the co-creator of holiday musicals at Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati. McDonough, a CSF subscriber, knew the group's stable of actors and wrote a play with them in mind.

While McDonough's experiment hasn't gone off the tracks like Dr. Kaufmann's, it has a few problems of its own. But that's the nature of research: No risks taken, nothing learned. I suspect that CSF has learned a lot from staging A Chance of Lightning.

For instance, the company has mined the depths of its actors' talents. It's intriguing to see performers we've enjoyed in Shakespearean roles now playing contemporary characters. Dubin, for instance, was a dogmatic but human Shylock in Merchant of Venice; Nick Rose, here playing Zachary, the menacing but implacable mastermind behind Kaufmann's kidnapping, recently rolled around the stage as Falstaff. McDonough has built roles to fit the actors' traits and skills: Dubin is a self-contained, tightly wound intellectual, while Rose is an icy, commanding and manipulative presence.

It's also evident that CSF director Jasson Minadakis and the actors worked with McDonough to build foundations for each character and to refine the play's tale. (McDonough used as his inspiration Aeschylus' ancient Greek tragedy, Prometheus Bound, recounting the hero who dared to give fire -- and knowledge -- to man and was punished by Zeus for his audacity by being tied to a rock and gnawed at by an eagle. The linkage is loose; familiarity enriches the play, but it's not a prerequisite for understanding.) Yet it's precisely Lightning's narrative line that could use still more clarification. So much effort has been expended on the characters -- each actor offers a well-crafted portrait that's worth seeing -- that the plot suffers. Without giving anything away, it simply needs to be observed that the climax occurs off-stage, and the play's message is inconclusive.

While several characters have moments of hilarious comedy in A Chance of Lightning when expectations are reversed, those moments run counter to the profoundly serious story. Amy Hutchins is especially satisfying as Iona, the doctor's date, innocently drawn into the kidnapping. Her comic skills shine as she nervously hums off-key tunes and talks a mile a minute, mouthing platitudes about men. Even funnier is a frenetic sequence by Brian Isaac Phillips as Davis, a hotheaded interloper from "the agency," comically disguised as a mailman (a "letter carrier," Iona reminds him). Phillips' appearance is exceedingly amusing, but it jars the play's momentum and seems stylistically at odds with everything around it. The cast also includes Jeff Groh as a nervous and overly twitchy Neo-Nazi; Anne E. Schilling as his whiny, religious girlfriend; and Giles Davies as a mentally deficient flunky.

A Chance of Lightning is given a realistic setting (designed by Todd Edwards): Dr. Kaufmann is held hostage in a ramshackle barn, strewn with hay, and convincing thunder rolls constantly (to remind us of "a chance of lightning," I suppose). The glaring kerosene lanterns are a bit distracting, but that's a minor point.

As Dr. Kaufmann learns, experiments involve risk. CSF is to be admired for following the same path. The results for each are perhaps not what was anticipated, but the process itself is educational. While Lightning fails to spark completely, there's more than enough heat to make this effort worth seeing.

A CHANCE OF LIGHTNING is being staged by the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, 719 Race St., Downtown, through June 24.

E-mail Rick Pender

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