Thursday, Jan. 18, 2018 | 2 a.m.
When the Minnesota Vikings took a knee and declined to attempt the extra point Sunday, you likely were unmoved by the decision, since the Vikings already had won their game by five points and wisely wished to risk nothing further. You were unmoved, that is, unless you were sitting in Las Vegas, with money on the New Orleans Saints who, in some casino sports books, were 5.5-point underdogs. That knee represented cash money, and if your mind immediately went to the myriad complexities of that particular consequence, then I have a show for you: "Flamingo & Decatur."
Todd Taylor's new play is a black comedy about gambling in Las Vegas, and, if you spend some of your leisure time staring at decks of cards, you'll immediately intuit that the author knows whereof he writes. Indeed, Taylor is a professional gambler turned playwright, which is a far more interesting provenance for a writer than an Ivy League MFA program. Taylor's play is set during the Las Vegas bust of 2008 and follows the fortunes of a couple of guys (played by Drew Johnson and Jason M. Shipman) who are helping a bank look after one of the many foreclosed valley houses without actually letting the bank in on their plans. They're thus fluid enough to take on a new roommate (played by Stephanie Bignault), while also vulnerable to being blackmailed by their snot of a neighbor (played, in weaselly fashion, by Nathaniel Stahlke).
"Flamingo & Decatur" is produced in Chicago by Block St Theatre Company, an entity based (go figure) in Fayetteville, Ark.
Much of the dialogue in this piece is about poker, and fun is had with the proclivity of the adherents of that game to tell tall tales, many of them involving a so-called bad beat story. Therein the teller recounts a sudden shift in fortune at the tables so unexpected and catastrophic as to trump all other such stories, and one of the players in Taylor's play, the formidable nocturnal shark Nicole (the excellent Bignault) has a doozy. It is all I can do not to reprint it here, and thus magnify the cautionary tale, or the schadenfreude, to more hearers, but it feels unfair to Taylor, who should not have his best material stolen by a critic.
There's a lot of other good material, and some lively, if broad, acting in director Kevin Christopher Fox's production, which is often funny and smart. Joe Schermoly's setting is amusing, too, even if he didn't have the budget to build a credible hot tub, around which much of the action takes place.
I think the play goes seriously downhill late in Act 2, not that we need an Act 2, as if Taylor has not yet figured out where he wants to go with these characters or what they represent in these strange times, in the weirdest American city of them all. Taylor knows the people he is writing about: He still has to figure out what constitutes the end of their story.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
