'Gods and Monsters' has an old-fashioned Hollywood ending

In 1998, a film called “Gods and Monsters” told the semi-fictional story of the final days of James Whale, an English director best known for directing “Frankenstein”, “The Bride of Frankenstein” and a handful of other films of horror. films in the early 1930s.

Like many self-defined British artists in early Hollywood, Whale felt like he was remembered for his pap while his greatest work, particularly for the theater, was forgotten. He was also openly gay throughout his career, a true rarity in Hollywood at that time, with the celluloid closet doors remaining mostly firmly shut. Bill Condon's film, based on a 1995 novel by Christopher Bram, starred Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser and Lynn Redgrave and won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. Whale has retired and falls in love with his gardener. This man, Clayton Boone, was a fictional creation of Bram, the younger half of the film's central relationship. The case highlights Whale's misery at the end of his life and the fact that he recklessly imposed that pain on Boone, a character who becomes almost like Frankenstein, the very character Whale came to despise and yet on which his legacy has remained so dependent.

In the film, Whale and Boone are white. In Tom Mullen's new stage adaptation, currently having its world premiere in Chicago and worth seeing, Boone is written as a black character, a cautious man and a military veteran who wears fake glasses so as not to threaten the Hollywood studio elites, and therefore the already strained relationship. is further complicated by race.

This new Equity-affiliated commercial production, directed by Paul Oakley Stovall (an immensely talented Chicago theater veteran), is not at all like a typical small-scale Theater Wit show, from the glossy program (a rarity welcome) to the rich, digitally enhanced scenic design of Ben Lipinski and Mike Tutaj.

This live “Gods and Monsters” is also a very powerfully acted affair, thanks to veteran Chicago actor Scott Westerman, who plays Whale as a man blocked not so much by the closet door as by his own demons, and Rashun Carter , who delivers a measured, sophisticated performance that really seems to capture the plight of a black gardener in 1950s Hollywood. For me in particular, Mullen's adaptation is strikingly evocative of the way we all lose power as we age. With this loss of power but maintenance of increasingly frenzied desire, the series seems to be saying, comes a dangerous vulnerability of the kind that can get people into trouble.

Then there's the other side of the coin that Stovall pays equal attention to: Hollywood's needy men may offer seductive entrees to posh pool parties and the like, but they also make perilous friends, only reinforced in this story by racial disparities. Here, the work falls squarely into “Sunset Boulevard” territory as it suggests that the toxicity of aging can culminate in a person dying in a swimming pool. There's even a Max-like enabler in Whale's longtime aide, Maria Ramirez, warmly played by Doreen Calderon, but not without a certain inscrutability and withheld approval.

To be convinced by any of this, you have to be interested in somewhat overripe Hollywood stories, and I wouldn't pretend that any of the problems you face here will seem new or particularly subtle to you. But the small cast (Michael Stejskal and Ethan Check are also present) succeeds in this mission with flying colors and you will surely be transported to the old school of Tinsel Town, where a lot of ruthless ambition, pain and hatred await you, with what I think. I describe it as a kind of buoyant melancholy as the show heads towards the tragic ending you always knew was coming. Everyone involved here clearly understood that nothing would work if the audience couldn't see past the now hackneyed idea of ​​homosexuality as a marker of sadness and really didn't care about Whale, trapped by his life and its time.

And that is surely the case.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

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Review: “Gods and Monsters” (3.5 stars)

When: Until June 2

Where: Wit Theater, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.

Duration: 1h30

Tickets: $37.75 to $47.75 at 773-975-8150 and godsandmonstersonstage.com