Guinea Pig Solo

Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

"It's a scary time," says Jose Solo, the anguished Iraq war veteran at the heart of Brett C. Leonard's intensely disturbing play "Guinea Pig Solo." "You can't see the world for what it is."

And in Anthony Moseley's searing, superbly acted production for Collaboraction, one of the best Chicago shows of the year so far, the perils of the moment get articulated with emotional force. Stubbornly unsubtle, relentlessly kinetic and perfectly willing to overstate in service of shock, this genuinely startling piece of theater lodges under the skin like a needy parasite.

And thanks in no small measure to a blistering lead performance from Dale Rivera, it burrows away long after the final curtain. Poor Solo is not talking about the lethal road to the Baghdad Airport. He's talking about the urban jungle of Manhattan, where a vet from Spanish Harlem can't count on respect and gratitude, but sure can count on tickets from Mayor Bloomberg, racist cops, an alienated son, an unfaithful wife and a lousy VA medical system with no timely provision for mental health.

Deservedly a big hit in New York in 2004, "Guinea Pig Solo" partly is an angry expose of the veteran's perennial lot; partly an embittered apologia for why urban men on the cusp of middle age can get so violently angry; and partly a look at the horrors of urban isolation. None of these themes is original, the piece intermittently recalls David Mamet's "Edmond," Stephen Adly Guirgis' "Jesus Hopped the A Train" and Emily Mann's "Still Life." And it's an intentional attempt to update Georg Buchner's 1836 drama "Woyczek," a proto-naturalist work depicting the gradual degradation of a man trapped by heredity and environment.

But you don't need to know Buchner to appreciate "Guinea Pig Solo." This play also explores the perilous boundaries between vulnerable idealism and arming cynicism. "It's a Louis Armstrong world," insists the cop who simultaneously helps and destroys Jose (he calls him Joe, because he's "in America now"). But in actuality, the cop has no aching soul, which is how he survives. Jose is not so lucky.

Mosley's work often features splashy multimedia staging, and this one has some of those elements. But it's not the video tricks that dominate here; it's the way this savvy show divides the characters into isolating boxes. Sam Porretta's set design is more innovative than one initially appreciates. At this budgetary level, it is brilliant work. We see Solo trying to run off his anger on treadmills actual and metaphorical, even as his wife, Vivian (the superb Sandra Delgado), flounces about lost, and his little boy (the haunting Ricky Ramirez) sits silently, endlessly throwing a ball against the wall. It's that image of the abused kid, who will surely make an angry adult, that makes this piece so tough to take at times. Indeed, its wrenching climax is tough to sit through in silence: most of the opening-night audience screeched in one way or another.

But this willingness to disturb is also what makes it feel so vital and so apt to the moment. Collaboraction tends to disappear for long periods, but it also tends to produce a show only when it has something to say. With "Guinea Pig Solo," that's demonstrably the case. It's not to be missed by those who like theater to hit the back of the gut" -