SUPERIOR DONUTS at the Music Box

(Seen 10/28/09)

Comfort food aplenty is being dispersed at the SUPERIOR DONUTS shop --- really a diner, of sorts, and American diners are legend for comfort foods, with a liberal portion of heartburn thrown in for free!

Tracy Letts' new play. straight from its creation at Steppenwolf, hits Broadway with a tug at your heart, and a panoply of all the street people that inhabit a seedy part of Chicago, now going upscale.

But our hero, Arthur, is still stuck in his Vietnam draft-dodging days, attired in T-shirts from a past musical era and sporting a graying ponytail. Team him up with a young, black hustler-type, who is writing the great American novel while sinking in gambling debts, and acerbic laughter and verbal fireworks explode.

The play has all the elements of a past Norman Lear tv sitcom --- but the exceptional and dynamic acting by Michael McKean snd John Michael Hill raises the believability level. Unfortunately, the play, with all its sub-plots and machinations, doesn't move them out of a predictable melodramatic story, which tidily ends, rather than finishes.

"Superior" may reflect the donuts or the street or the Great Lake, but the play needs more leavening and less frosting.