“The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey” Reviewed by Jacob Davis

**** For their thirty-first season, Trap Door Theatre is remounting three of their popular recent productions for short runs, in addition to original productions to debut in the upcoming months. First up is a revival of The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey, which first played in 2022, and is now back even tighter and more focused. Written by Polish playwright Sławomir Mrożek in 1959, this story about a family who coped with disaster by agreeing to be made into a public spectacle was prescient of the Youtuber era. Originally directed by Trap Door’s now-managing director Nicole Wiesner and with revival direction by Miguel Long, Peter Ohey is a tragedy told through the tropes of modern comfort-food entertainment, centered on an ordinary man who unexpectedly gets the chance to star in a circus at the price of giving people what they really want to see.

Peter Ohey (Keith Surney) seems quite content with his middle-class existence. His wife (Tia Pinson, but Emily Nichelson at the performance I attended) feels emotionally neglected, but Peter just reads and sips his coffee while his children play pretend that there’s a tiger in the bathtub faucet. But suddenly, a government official (Carl Wisniewski) shows up, telling him in a manner both apologetic and threatening that there is a problem involving tigers and plumbing that legally requires his family’s cooperation. And the scientist (Holly Cerney) tells him that bathroom-tigers are a fast-moving, little-understood field, but they’re taking a wait-and-see approach, and that he’s forbidden from disrupting their research. And the tax collector (Joan Nahid) says the tiger is an asset the Oheys are on the hook for. So it’s a relief when the circus manager (David Lovejoy) tells them that they can recoup their losses and sense of control by welcoming the public into their home, reassuring them that people love a window into intimate dysfunction and that the lurking danger will resonate with the people’s long-buried instincts. So long as there’s a demonstration that the stakes are real and there’s a satisfactory build to the foreshadowed conclusion, of course.

Keith Surney plays Peter as a bit of a sad sack, mostly bewildered and submissive to authority during this absurd ordeal. The most pushback he gives is threatening not to share his gooseberries if the officials keep being mean to him. And yet, there are signs Peter fancies himself the protagonist. Canned laughter plays as he chokes his fabulist son during one of the innumerable moments staged to reference older sitcoms, and like everyone else, he frequently bursts into song in hope of getting a laugh for reference humor. Intriguingly, he also makes a friend, Old Man Hunter (Bob Wilson), who hails from the frontier steppe and has no fear of the tiger. In a show where everyone’s an archetype, this figure embodies the sort of romantic man-against-nature struggle that has been totally snuffed out of the Oheys’ lives, and Peter greatly admires him. Old Man Hunter’s fatherly reassurance is about the only source of kindness and encouragement in Peter’s life, as well, and he alone thinks Peter needs to be saved.

Although it has a short running time, The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey is extremely high energy throughout. Which is the point; whether you’re running a circus, writing a weekly sitcom, or milling out content from the comfort of your own home, the way to keep the audience’s attention is to move on to the next thing before they can figure out whether a joke landed. Not all of them need to. The whole cast sings, dances, fights, and does magic tricks, and sound designer Danny Rocket also supplies original music that the circus manager sheepishly admits melodrama leans on to lend its text emotional power. I was struck by how much the show opened up for me just two years after last seeing it, with the context having shifted from the anxiety of the pandemic back to our reliance on endless entertainment to scratch the need for stimulus left by the absence of the wilderness. During a rare moment of insight, the scientist speculates that the autogenesis of a faucet tiger may just be nature smashing its own rules out of boredom. Nature doesn’t really do that, but Mrożek seems to be suggesting society does, with somebody always wanting to be the next main character.

“The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey” will continue at Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W Cortland Ave, Chicago, thru September 28, at the following times:

Thursdays: 8:00 pm
Fridays: 8:00 pm
Saturdays: 8:00 pm
Running time is seventy-five minutes with no intermission.
Tickets are $30 with 2 for 1 admission on Thursdays. Special group rates are available.

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