February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
For a resolutely Irish-American actor, Michael McKean has a distinct propensity for finding himself playing characters wth hard-to-pronounce Middle-European names.
In the long-running television series, “Laverne and Shirley,” he was the affably comedic Lenny Kosnowski, and now, in “Superior Donuts,” he’s Arthur Przybyewski, proprietor of a donut shop in Chicago.
Film fans know McKean for his roles in Christopher Guest’s satirical movies, starting with “This is Spinal Tap, and including “Best in Show,” “For Your Consideration” and “A Mighty Wind.” For the latter movie, a satire on folk music and folk singers, McKean and his wife, Annette O’Toole, wrote the Oscar-nominated song, “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow.”
Last season he appeared in the successful Broadway revival of Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming,” and, the previous season, he played the “time study man,” Hinzie, in the well-received new staging of “The Pajama Game.”
That’s a impressively varied list of credits, but in “Superior Donuts,” by Tracy Letts, author of “August, Osage County,” McKean is doing something he’s never done before: heading the cast of a new play which rests on his shoulders.
Among the truly remarkable things about McKean’s beautifully crafted starring performance is its modesty and the degree to which he underplays the role. His achievement, worthy of a Tony nomination, is all the more startling when you factor in the effect of the excellent, but flashier, work being done by a young African-American actor, Jon Michael Hill, cast opposite him in Letts’ complicated comedy.
Hill, as Franco Wicks, a troubled youngster with a dangerous secret history, takes a job at the donut shop, and stays long enough to teach his boss some valuable life-changing lessons before his fate catches up with him.
The dynamic young actor, who has been a member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater since 2007, has the audience in his pocket almost from his first line. McKean, on the other hand, begins as quietly as a real Arthur, a man who has long lost any major interest he might ever have had in his life or his work.
The early morning life of the shop surrounds him on what would be a completely ordinary day but for the fact that there had been an attempted break-in during the night. Before the curtain rises, the audience has heard the sound of breaking glass as the would-be burglars violate the shop’s street door.
The donut shop’s regulars, including a couple of local cops, this time responding to the robbery report, saunter in. The others turn up as they might do on any ordinary day. To Arthur’s daily customers the break-in is just something that might happen at any time in this crime-ridden neighborhood, and it doesn’t hold their attention for very long once their initial curiosity is satisfied.
“Superior Donuts” is a surprisingly gentle and satisfying work from a prolific playwright who generally comes up with harsher stuff, including the off-Broadway hits, “Killer Joe” and “Bug.”