Review: In ‘The Whistleblower’ at Theater Wit, a misanthropic playwright takes a stand for truth

From Clifford Odets and Tennessee Williams to Theresa Rebeck and David Mamet, playwrights have repeatedly written about their anguish over selling their souls for a Hollywood dime. And that’s even without a writers strike.

The new Itamar Moses play at Theater Wit is a further entry in that long-standing genre; Moses (“The Band’s Visit”) is a longtime and distinguished writer who, these last several years, has mostly been writing for the screens inside your home; always a tricky trade-off.

In “The Whistleblower,” Moses’ titular scribe, Eli (played by Ben Faigus), is so disturbed by the need to pitch his ideas for television that it sparks a full-blown existential crisis that involves getting everyone in his orbit to face uncomfortable truths about themselves and thus blows up his entire career and personal life. And there’s a further self-referential rub: The very script he is pitching just happens to be the story of a writer’s meltdown, prefiguring what then happens to that very writer himself.

Sounds like smart-eyed fun? It is, to some extent, although I wish the bumpy and uneven new production at Theater Wit from director Jeremy Wechsler felt more believable, rather than being a collection of stagy and often overplayed scenes that go more for the laughs than the requisite underpinning reality. That’s always one of the dangers in plays about such easy targets as Hollywood agents and executives; the rush to cliché is such a grave and present danger that it requires far more vigilance than appears to have been the case with this Chicago premiere of a play previously seen at the Denver Center Theatre.

But the lack of truth undercuts elsewhere, too: I don’t know why it bothered me so much to see so many sotto voce conversations that would clearly have been overheard by people three feet away, but that might have been because the script itself rails so much against the “lies” at the core of entertainment created for a large public, and indeed at the way we all conduct ourselves in our dissembling personal lives.

Faigus, Michael Kostroff (playing a standard-issue TV producer), William Anthony Sebastian Rose II (as Eli’s agent), RjW Mays (as Eli’s mom) and Julia Alvarez (as Eli’s wife and girlfriend) all get some laughs. But the show, wherein some actors play more than one character, feels too predictable. The best scenes here involve the sardonic, understated Rae Gray, who plays Eli’s sister and a beleaguered assistant, the only two characters on the stage with enough palpable pain as to be really able to exist in Los Angeles or anywhere else.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “The Whistleblower” (2 stars)

When: Through June 17

Where: Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Tickets: $18-$55 at theaterwit.org