The comedy “Superior Donuts” premiered at Steppenwolf in 2008 and moved to Broadway the next year for a three-month run. Written by Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright Tracy Letts, who is a member of Steppenwolf’s ensemble, the play launched the career of fellow ensemble member Jon Michael Hill. Hill was nominated for a Tony for his performance.
Remounted by The Artistic Home at the Den Theatre through Dec. 6, “Superior Donuts” tells a cross-generational, cross-racial story about a pair of guys who form an unlikely friendship. Over doughnuts and coffee, a common appreciation for literature, frequent visits from neighbors, and the daily operations of a run-down Uptown establishment, the duo form a bond. The sitcom-esque play has a million ingredients, yet still lacks substance.
The action takes place in an old doughnut shop in Uptown that has seen better days. Arthur Pryszbyszewski (Scott Westerman) has inherited the business, but is having trouble keeping it going. He’s grieving the recent death of his ex-wife and holding on to past trauma that makes it impossible for him to manage day-to-day.
Enter Franco Wicks (John N. Williams), a fast-talking 21-year old employee and aspiring writer, who bursts into Arthur’s life as a ball of energy. Wicks has big ideas for the future of the shop.
The set up itself is formulaic, and nearly 20 years after its world premiere, it feels a little stale. The trope of an old grumpy set-in-his-ways white guy who bonds with a younger hip idealistic Black guy has been done plenty of times in pop culture. There’s no fresh wrinkle to make the relationship stand out and the rigid parallels between the characters stand in the way of connections. Their friendship is dead center in the play, yet it never fully matriculates.
Franco spends the majority of the play talking a mile-a-minute while trying to pry open the shell of the clammy old man. Every time the conversations move from surface level and into any real exploration of Arthur, the latter shuts down, often through misguided anger. These outbursts send Franco offstage, and Arthur has deep moments of reflection between himself and the audience. This is where Westerman shines, through flashes where he has the audience in the palm of his hand as he recounts his personal misfortunes of draft evasion, or the last time he saw his daughter, which was a highlight of the play.
The drawback is that the most emotional scenes are not between the two men at the heart of the play, but instead with Westerman alone.
Westerman’s performance is admirable. But in a buddy comedy, we need the buddies to connect, and it never really happens. In the end, when Arthur finally opens up, it is Franco who falls silent, so the two never meet in the same place at the same time.
Throughout the show, the dynamic between Arthur and Franco feels off. The play takes place in the early 2000s, but the two characters seem to be written like they live in different eras. Arthur is the comedic straight man clearly aged by his stories of war. Franco feels like the jovial sidekick ripped from the era of “The Honeymooners” with a touch of the 70s à la “What’s Happening!” His mannerisms and delivery come off a little too shuck-and-jive-ish to mesh with Arthur, and feels out of place with the rest of the play. Too often when Arther and Franco are having a heart-to-heart, Franco’s cartoonish demeanor is so overwhelming it takes away from the scene.
The subplots in the story feel a little contrived. In the opening scene, Arthur’s shop has been vandalized. He’s nowhere to be found, but Max Tarasov (Reid Coker), the owner of an electronics shop next door, appears on the scene with police after reporting the incident on Arthur’s behalf. Max is Russian, more caricature than character, and wants to buy Arthur’s shop to expand his own business. According to Max, the neighborhood is plagued by “Black sons of b——.” Max, who screams this phrase at least five times, has a distrust of every race but his own.
Similarly contrived is Franco’s backstory. He’s racked up a $16,000 gambling debt with the local loan shark. He lives with his single mother and a younger sibling, so he’s working at the doughnut shop earning $8 per hour to pay off the debt his bookie expects in a week. His bookie is played excellently by Adam Schulmerich, who recently portrayed another sleaze ball, Bill, in “Lobby Hero.” Schulmerich nails both roles flawlessly.
Director John Mossman does a good job keeping the action moving fluidly. The set design by Kevin Hagan is spot on with the look and feel of a small North Side doughnut shop. But there is a level of depth that this show never truly achieves. Early on, the production takes a few swings at talking about race, but misses the mark, and instead goes farcicle with tough-guy Russians and a jive-talking Black kid. The dialogue never scratches the surface of this city’s multiracial community where there are opportunities for different cultures to have more meaningful conversation than superficial ones, like “Bet ‘cha can’t name five Black poets.”
Mossman deserves credit for holding together the comedy, and the laughs are plentiful. But they land too methodically, almost as if there is a laugh track queuing the audience on when to chuckle.