REVIEW: Advance Man: Part One of the Honeycomb Trilogy, with Strawdog Theatre Company.

There’s a humorous (if perhaps apocryphal) line attributed to the great John Waters that I see tossed around the internet every now and then; “If you come out of a movie and the first thing you say is, 'the cinematography was beautiful,' it's a bad movie.” You can debate how much you actually agree with that specific bon mot until the cows come home, but along similar lines, after seeing Strawdog Theatre Company’s production of Mac Rogers' Advance Man: Part One of the Honeycomb Trilogy, it’s probably not the best sign that my immediate first thought was “well...I thought the set was pretty great.”

And let's be entirely clear here; it's a damn great set. Designer Brandii Champagne gives us a sleek, inviting living-room space with light colorful hues that lull us in as we enter the theater, with glaring pockets of wall missing throughout, daring us to check our expectations of what this room really is. This kind of metaphorical design work - raw and savage and existing outside of the diegesis of the literal action of the play - is often my favorite type of scenic design, providing an audience with the necessary tools to understand the literal playing space of a show, while giving us some sense of subtextual atmosphere that guides us through the evening. It's genuinely impressive stuff.

Alas, resting upon the laurels of great scenic design does not a good play make, and the work that begins to fill this particular room leaves much to be desired. The ambitions of Rogers' Honeycomb Trilogy, a decades-spanning work of sci-fi drama centered around the fractured Cooke Family, are certainly lofty and admirable, and based on the synopses of the subsequent entries, Rogers' imagination has taken him to some fascinating destinations. But judging from director Noah Elman's production of this first chapter, at least, I'm unsure how eager I am to even see parts two and three.

Ask me what Advance Man is about and I'd likely tell you that it’s primarily a play about Proper Nouns. It's about Chinampas Swamp Farms and a Honeycomb Hivemind and a dead astronaut named Tom Wiley and endless, head-pounding layers of information constantly flung at you from every direction. As a playwright, Rogers falls into the fatal trap that often comes with genre-writing, where Things Happening becomes the modus operandi of the script, and finding out What Thing Will Happen Next becomes the driving force above other minor concerns that come with a work of art like Character or Atmosphere or Emotion. I could certainly give you a micro-synopsis of the events of Advance Man, getting into the weeds concerning the astronauts who have returned home from a three-year Mars mission, the mysterious meetings they're having in the Cooke Family living room, how the family members of the central astronaut, Bill Cooke (Michael Stejskal), have various wants and needs come into conflict with Bill's secret motivations. But there's nothing under the surface of these plot points that's really worth digging into; the play exists mainly as an exposition dump occurring in slow motion. Events take place in Advance Man because the only thing the play is built to do is to Have Events Take Place. Where does a critic go from there?

Given these frustrating circumstances, Elman's production somehow moves along as well as it can. Scenes move from one to the next with the aid of pulsating (if repetitive) transitions that keep the energy afloat, and Elman has set the metronome for his actors at a steady pace, the story moving along with an ease that makes it eminently watchable, even as you keep wondering why we're watching what we're watching. Performances run the gamut, with Michael Stejskal and Julie Partyka (playing Bill's beleaguered wife, Amelia) emerging as the production's most successful players, mainly due to these characters having some of the only compelling pieces of writing throughout. Most other characters fill rather thankless roles, aiding with the narrative's frequent twists and turns but not adding much else to the world. The performers are also, tragically, left to aimlessly navigate some remarkably poorly crafted moments of fight choreography (characters "striking" each other with no sense of weight or urgency) and intimacy choreography (characters "making out" with their mouths completely shut) that remove any sense of verisimilitude from the proceedings.

My biggest struggle looking back on Advance Man is how to fairly assess this as what is being marketed as a standalone piece of theater. Rogers and Strawdog, respectively, insist on telegraphing that these are plays that can function on their own outside of the context of the Honeycomb Trilogy, yet Strawdog has made the utmost bizarre decision to end their production with a massive time jump to a five-second fragment of the next play in the series. Without even a genuine promise that Strawdog will be producing parts 2 and 3, what are we supposed to take away from this limp noodle of an ending, yet another decision that supports the notion that this play is about nothing more than What Thing Happens Next? Because behind the twists and turns and endless, endless proper nouns, what is Advance Man even about? Maybe that wonderful set design carries the answer too. Underneath that ornate wallpaper, what is really there to see? You guessed it; nothing.

Advance Man: Part One of the Honeycomb Trilogy runs an estimated 2 hours, including a 10-minute intermission, and performs at the Factory Theater (1623 W. Howard) through September 27th 2026. Tickets are available HERE.

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