Simone LaPierre stars in "Diamond Girl."
This weekend, local author Bruce Calhoun is remounting his play Diamond Girl at the Bartell Theatre, as a benefit for rainforest conservation. But with a convoluted plot, painfully predictable dialogue, Scooby-Doo special effects, and tortured references to ancient Greek classics, this play is not ready for prime time.
Diamond Girl focuses on a young woman whose life seems to be falling apart. Rita Chase (Simone LaPierre) has dropped out of grad school and now works in a swanky jewelry store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Her travel agent boyfriend (Ethan Richard) has just dumped her, and her evil stepsister Iphigenia (Gina Gomez) is kicking her out of the house because Daddy promised it to her as soon as she began to procreate. Newly pregnant, heartless sis arrives promptly to take over the lease. Meanwhile, disapproving stepfather and Euripides scholar Eliot Hunt (Joe Lutz) has no time for his poor stepdaughter’s problems. He is taking his sycophant grad student Hayworth Sardeson (Drew Lehman) on a quest to find the lost plays of the ancient Greeks. And to let us know what serious scholars these two academics are, an entire scene is devoted to aggressively pedantic bickering about theater history and criticism, which neither informs the audience about these characters nor moves the plot forward. It seems to be a long winded in-joke for Dionysus festival nerds.
Then Rita puts on a $2 million diamond necklace, and all the boys come swarming around her. What luck! The only complication is that now the diamond choker won’t come off, no matter what the enterprising jewelry store staff tries. It takes the characters an entire act to figure out that perhaps the necklace is enchanted, while the audience is alerted to its otherworldly power almost immediately. Swirly music plays and lights flicker, cued by the forlorn heroine making a wish to finally find the right guy, while leaning on the case where the mysterious Bohemian necklace is displayed. And sure enough, after a lot of fairytale-esque attempts by suitors to remove the enchanted bauble, Prince Charming succeeds — and it turns out the “right guy” was under her nose the whole time! Aw...
In between Rita’s attempts to catch the perfect man, there are several dream sequences set in ancient Greece which also don’t move the story forward, or really connect with the archaeological dig that Professor Hunt is on — an expedition that is successful after a whopping two days, although other scholars have been searching for these lost texts for hundreds of years.
With names like Hunt and Chase, Roland Royce, Kitty Hawke and Andrew Vanderfellow, the author seems to writing a tongue-in-cheek murder mystery, but the show is neither funny, nor all that mysterious. By pairing the contemporary characters with icons of Greek mythology, one might guess this was an update of an ancient myth, but unless Helen of Troy’s face launched all those ships thanks to a sparkly choker, there aren’t enough dots to connect that theory either.
The cast struggles through the mish-mashed script with varying levels of success. Ethan Richard and Britton Rae come closest to presenting three-dimensional characters, but to no good end. They simply dance along to the interstitial music from the 1940s, in this story set in 2017, with inexplicable detours to ancient Athens.