LA Weekly

Burning Down the House
Simon Block’s Chimps takes a comic view of suburban immolation
--Steven Leigh Morris

From the start of his sometimes clumsy yet riveting 1997 thriller, Chimps, playwright Simon Block has it in for his central character. Young dolt Mark (Shawn Lee) has quit his job delivering mail to create a children’s book based on the alphabet, with each page comprised of a letter and a baroque illustration. Mark is speculating that the profits from his kiddie book will hold up his lagging end of the finances in his domestic partnership with girlfriend Stevie (Sara Hennessy). But first he has to finish the book, and Mark is notoriously slow in every aspect of his life. (That he’s quite literally banking, at Stevie’s expense, on selling his children’s book tells you all you need to know.) Mark’s two ornate renderings on cardboard, perched conspicuously on a bookshelf — “‘A’ is for Armadillo, ‘B’ is for Bunny” — stand as a rim-shot testament to all he’s accomplished in the past several weeks — only 24 letters to go.

Stevie spends most of the play fuming at Mark — that he leaves her laundry to fester on the clothesline while she’s at work, that he keeps refusing to take paying jobs. Pregnant with his child, Stevie pays their mortgage and all their other bills. She’s neither impressed nor beguiled by Mark’s excruciating-to-behold creative process. “When I come home and see you drawing on your hands and knees, in your underwear, I just want to put my fist through a wall,” she remarks dryly.

Hennessy’s preponderance of fury-laced lines could easily render her a shrew, but she downplays her barbs with a consistently muted exasperation that anchors Stevie as the one character we can trust. She’s the grownup and Mark is off somewhere