Legion Review

Theater Review: Legion By Brian Kirst

www.wildclawtheatre.com

With milky dream sequences, inmates whose babbling rivals Shakespeare’s witches, mummified corpses and a blood drained priest or two (every former altar boy’s revenge fantasy come to life), WildClaw Theatre Company’s current stage adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s Legion ultimately awes with its ambition and multiple accomplishments. That its countless arcs and feast of characters ultimately don’t gel as tightly as last year’s wickedly taut zombie epic, The Revenants, is a complaint that can be pretty much overlooked by the evening’s end- Legion still compels and it remains quite clear that no one can attack macabre theatre quite as well as WildClaw can. (Heck, here they bring a very complicated book and subsequent film, Exorcist III, to the stage with many moments of true glory.)

As much a play about questioning fate and faith as twisted (and insidiously intelligent) demonic possession, adaptor Charlie Sherman keeps all the juicy character background of Blatty’s original work while stirring in healthy morsels of true, bittersweet comedy to elevate the moments of satanic tension. As Lieutenant Kinderman (ably enacted by Len Bajenski), one of the original Exorcist’s main characters, eventually discovers who is behind a series of brutal killings in Georgetown, the story’s true strengths come into vivid focus and the elegantly controlled work of actor Scott T. Barsotti (as the essence of a presumed dead serial killer among others) brings the work a true sense of completion.

Fellow performers Cheryl Roy, Brian Amidei, Ariel Brenner and HB Ward also bring layered magnetism to the proceedings, leaving one anxious for what else lays in store for those who venture into the further worlds of spook that WildClaw so lovingly conjures.

Legion runs through April 16th at the Viaduct in Chicago. Performances are Thursdays, Saturdays at 7:30 PM and Sunday at 3 PM.