The K of D
At the Route 66 Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—“Once Upon a Time” may be the three most magical words in our culture. They instantly trigger images of fantastical events that take us to distant lands populated by wondrous people.
Laura Schellhardt’s “The K of D” is a “once upon a time” play. She even subtitles her work “An urban legend.” But “The K of D” doesn’t transport the audience to a fairy tale world. The story takes place in a small western Ohio town called St. Marys. It may be a ghost story, but like all good ghost stories we are never really sure whether the supernatural is really at play. The drama is eerie without being scary, but mostly it’s a fine slice of storytelling.
“The K of D” is a one-performer show
that runs about 75 minutes without an intermission. An actress narrates the
story and also impersonates residents of the town, both the young people and
the adults. The show is being presented by the Route 66 Theatre in a tiny
theater in the Old Town neighborhood. It’s a perfect venue for a tale that
profits from an intimate connection with the audience.
The cast consists of Gwendolyn Whiteside, a young woman who wears a T-shirt and cut-off jeans throughout the evening. She narrates the story like a female Tom Sawyer, and then easily morphs into the denizens of the town, starting with the small gang of teenagers led by a take-charge 15-year old named Becky who haughtily smokes bubblegum cigarettes to show everyone her superior sophistication. Quisp is the demonstrative one, with his arm swinging jive attitude. There is also a local teacher who wins the Teacher of the Year award in the community every year, possibly by murdering her competition. Some of these characters could live as easily among the grotesque residents in Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” as Schellhardt’s St. Marys.
The central incident in the play is the death of a boy, struck down by a car driven by the town thug. The dead boy has a twin sister named Charlotte who witnesses the accident. She holds her brother as he lies dying and just before he expires he kisses her on the lips, K of D meaning “kiss of death.” That kiss may transfer supernatural powers to the surviving twin, who immediately becomes mute.
Schellhardt tells a leisurely story. The death of the boy is established in the opening minutes of the play but the dramatist doesn’t do much with it until the last half of the evening. For the first half hour or so the play gets the audience acquainted with the assorted characters and establishes the ground rules for an urban legend (For example, the events never happen to the teller, who narrates the legend second hand, and the story usually occurs in a rural location and not in an urban area).
Whiteside gets plenty of help from Lindsay Jones’s sound design, which includes a whole repertoire of sound effects like animal and insect noises, water lapping, and automobile tires squealing. Jesse Klug’s lighting is always atmospheric, sometimes creepy and sometimes startling. Steve Key’s set consists of a rickety wooden boat dock at one side of the stage and a weathered wooden fence at the rear—just enough to establish the sense of a small town for the narrative.
Meredith McDonough is the director and she obviously worked closely with Whiteside to establish the story’s many characters and create the rising sense of tension in the story. It’s the best kind of directing, where the action seems to develop naturally and inevitably.
“The K of D” is like a good ghost story told around a flickering campfire, with the shadows concealing who knows what mysteries. The play has an agreeable ending, with the bad guy getting his comeuppance. But there is also an elegiac quality that nostalgically commemorates a vanishing world of small town America a generation or two ago. All in all, a very satisfying adventure in suggestive storytelling, and a terrific display of versatile acting.
The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars. June 2009