'Aunt Dan and Lemon' by Backstage Theatre: Beware childhood influences

Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

"Sit anywhere except that one couch and the bed,” are the instructions issued to anyone entering the basement of the Chopin Theatre for the Backstage Theatre Company production of Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon.” That leaves you with plenty of cushiony options in a space kitted out as a creepy boudoir, where a frail and genteel young woman named Lemon (Rebekah Ward-Hays) sips her little health drinks, spins memories of her English childhood, and talks intimately and gently of Nazis and fascism.

I hadn’t seen this fascinating play since I caught the London original at the Royal Court Theatre in 1985, starring Linda Hunt as Aunt Dan. (Steppenwolf Theatre also famously produced this play in 1987, starring Martha Lavey). “Aunt Dan and Lemon” is a delicate, smart, tricky and perennially controversial little play that here receives just the kind of carefully ambivalent, yet wholly immersive, handling it needs from director Matthew Reeder and a very shrewdly cast group of Chicago actors.

“Aunt Dan” makes all sides of the political spectrum uneasy. Conservatives won’t be fond of its specific linking of Henry Kissinger with violent immortality. Liberals will be queasy about the way Shawn makes such a careful case for the necessary horrors done in a nation’s name. In many ways, the character of Aunt Dan (here played by Brenda Barrie) is not unlike Col. Jessep in “A Few Good Men.” She argues that we can only able to be nice because men like Kissinger are out there doing essential things that aren’t nice at all. It’s just that we don’t like to handle that particular truth.

But real essence of “Aunt Dan” is its focus on the influence wrought by those with whom we are intimate when we are young. Aunt Dan was one of Lemon’s Anglo-American parents’ best friends during their Oxford days. Lemon and Aunt Dan have many chats. One could think of this play as a cautionary tale, reminding you to be careful about who gets to say what to your children.

Backstage certainly doesn’t shrink from the play’s scenes of sexual play, its probing of the line where free love becomes just another youth-poisoning transaction. Caitlin Emmons is fearless as Mindy, essentially an upscale hooker not unlike the one that took down Eliot Spitzer. And Anita Deely is quite moving as Lemon’s mother, a woman who lacks the force of personality to compete with the amoral but enigmatic Aunt Dan.

Barrie is hardly the usual type for Dan. But she has a very compelling (and shrewdly chilly) take on this dangerous character, and we surely believe that Ward-Hays is powerless in her grasp. Mostly notably, the tick-tock intimacy of Reeder’s domestic-like staging only enhances the power of the play.

I’d argue that Barrie could be yet tougher. And I think Ward-Hays could go more for the jugular in the crucial final monologue — when we really don’t need to be let off the hook. And a few of the actors slip, on occasions, into the realm of the overly broad. But if you’ve never seen “Aunt Dan,” and you prefer some intellectual bang for your theatergoing buck, you’ll surely be compelled down here by an impressionable young woman, the dangerous stories she gets told, and the horrific end result"