Tracy Letts's "Superior Donuts"
Highly entertained and moved by the magnificent vitriol of August: Osage County , I was looking forward to Tracy Letts's latest play. Superior Donuts , playing at The Music Box, was disappointing. The plotting and characters seemed to have come out of an extended TV episode. The writing, sprinkled with punchy one-liners, was as funny as a superior sitcom. Arthur Przybyszewski, the owner of a donut shop in uptown Chicago, evaded life and love until Franco Wicks, a young aspiring black writer who worked for him, changed him, and Arthur stood up for Franco and himself. He did so in a long fight sequence that was painful to watch because it was so bad. This was not the only mistake made by director Tina Landau. Another, more minor but telling, was the inconsistent behavior of the characters to winter in Chicago, as TH pointed out to me. The last scene compounded poor writing and directing. The characters made their excuses, one by one, to leave the shop, so as to ...