By Mary Shen Bainbridge, arts reporter
Windy City Times
Published July 16th 2003

Playwright: Lance Eliot Adams At: Pyewacket/Hunger And Dread Theatre at Chopin Studio, 1543 W. Division St. Phone: (773) 275-2201; $15 Runs through: Aug. 16

One could argue that ALL the iconography of American Life in the 1950s was a whitewash—wartime propaganda that didn’t know when to quit. But there’s no denying the impact in 1956 of Peyton Place, Grace Metalious’ censor-defying novel exposing the sordid underside of society in a New England factory town, its title to this day synonymous with such deceptively peaceful-looking communities. In recent years, however, vintage media-generated images of the mid-twentieth century, fortified by nostalgic myopia (e.g. Happy Days, Grease), have reasserted themselves to once again portray the decade as a time of quaint and happy innocence.

And in that misrepresentation lies the only justification for Lance Eliot Adams’ Close Your Eyes, a collection of museum-archive clichés not yet meriting the status of archetypes. We have the teenagers—the clean-cut football hero, the self-styled rebel, the nerdy sidekick, the thrill-seeking nympho, the shy girl-geek. And we have the adults—the protective father, the progressive father, the seductively reclusive widow, the mentally and physically impaired creep—ineffectual, if not outright counterproductive, role models for the youngsters who look to them for guidance.

Adams extends the genre to add a few surprises to its canon of shockers—if the “good” citizens are not as they appear, neither are some of the “bad.” Having introduced his characters with no hint of irony, however, Adams seems not to know what to do with them, contenting himself with portraiture of a dystopia oblivious to the social changes hindsight vision informs us will someday engineer its liberation. But two hours is a long time to stare at a single picture, especially since most of the company for this joint Pyewacket/Hunger and Dread Theatre production, like the playwright, look to have barely been doodles in their grandmothers’ algebra notebooks in 1957—the play’s alleged period—and thus limited in the depth they might have brought to their stereotypical roles.