Jilted, and Communing With a Serial-Killing Cannibal There are probably a good number of you out there who would never see a play that trades on the portrayal of a creepily charming Jeffrey Dahmer character. Who can say if this number is higher or lower than the number of you who would be persuaded to attend for precisely that same reason? So, it is to the rest of you that this review of Glass Bandits Theater Company's "feeling" is addressed - those residing in the muddy middle, who are perhaps both intrigued and disheartened by the reappropriation of a serial killer for entertainment. Here's the good news: Luke Robertson is fabulous as Dahmer. With apologies to Mr. Robertson's mother, for whom this is perhaps not unequivocally good news. He both delighted and disturbed on Monday night at the New Ohio Theater, and he did so in impressively understated fashion; I'll leave it to those more versed in Dahmer lore to attest to Mr. Robertson's accuracy - researching a monster's bedside manner seemed above and beyond the call of duty. But then, "feeling," written by Paul Cameron Hardy and directed by Eddie Prunoske, isn't interested in dismissing Dahmer as a monster. Instead, the play uses him as a traveling companion of sorts for Emma (Meredith Burns), a 29-year-old graduate student struggling to stay afloat after having been summarily dumped by Alex (Ben Mehl), her boyfriend of nine years. She isn't, in truth, struggling all that hard. She's drinking; rebuffing the comfort offered by her clumsy but well-meaning brother, Oliver (Carl Holder); throwing hygiene to the wind; and staying up all night reading Alex's old love letters. Then she happens upon a Dahmer book and grows so obsessed that the man begins visiting her, bearing brewskis and extended meditations on the human condition. He proves to be unsettlingly good company. But about that bad news: "feeling" doesn't quite earn its possession of this found object, whose strangeness lies outside the play's fairly routine understanding of itself. The pathos-laden, light-on-action plot narrowly hews to Emma's free fall after what seems a fairly benign breakup, and the acting is mostly sitcom-esque. It may be mildly distasteful to use Dahmer to rock such a conventional little boat - it's certainly a failure of imagination to not let him capsize it entirely.