Reviews

By Lauren Yee

Directed by Jess McLeod

Produced by Strawdog Theatre Company, Chicago

Losing a Child Can Be Complicated

The delicate awkwardness of grief and its potentially socially unacceptable forms are naturally alluring to many playwrights. For maximum confluence of guilt and loss, it is best to have parents mourning a child, and imbue at least one party with cringe-inducing flaws. So it was with Northlight’s Mothers and Sons and Route 66’s No Wake, and now, as part of a National New Play Network rolling world premiere, Lauren Yee offers her own take on the subject. In a Word, under the direction of Jess McLeod at Strawdog Theatre, is frank and brutal during its brief eighty minutes. But with Yee’s imagination and sense of humor, it also contains several surprises, and manages to be emotionally honest without being either hackneyed or irreverent.

Guy (John Ferrick) comes home to his wife, Fiona (Mary Winn Heider) one day, hoping to take her out to supper. He’s in a talkative mood, but she’s hiding something, and he soon figures out what. She’s been talking to the media again about her hope of locating their son, Tristan (Gabriel Franken, who also plays every other part), who disappeared two years ago at the age of six. This is problematic for two reasons. First, it makes Fiona sound crazy. A detective has made clear many times that it is extraordinarily unlikely that Tristan is still alive. But Fiona continues to hallucinate that she sees the kidnapper, and offers the detective useless evidence of these imaginary encounters. She also believes that the killer (she sometimes slips up and calls him that) is lurking around the house, and has visions associated with the last time she saw her son, on school picture day at the elementary school where she used to work as a teacher.

The other problem with her attitude is that it’s a lie. Guy tells us candidly fairly early on that Fiona’s descriptions of Tristan as an angelic child were not her opinion of him when he was alive. Tristan was adopted, and Guy and Fiona hadn’t known they were agreeing to raise a child with ADHD. Guy treated Tristan with genial negligence. Again and again, through flashbacks, we see the boy absorb some highly undesirable behavior from his father and his friends, which Guy never showed much concern over. We see that Fiona got along with Tristan better, at times, but also lashed out at him when he misbehaved or disappointed her. And Tristan caused a whole lot of embarrassment and disappointment. Fiona’s delusions are driven mainly by guilt, and while Guy pities her and is horrified by what happened, he feels it is high time they moved on.

How much we can identify with them is a testament to the skill of the actors. Crucially, Yee included a scene of Fiona being a pretty good mom to Tristan, which Heider and Franken perform with touching simplicity. That makes it a lot easier to swallow the way she treats him later. So, too, does having Tristan be played by an adult. This is highly risky, and the drawbacks are on full display, but there’s something especially distasteful about a full-grown man throwing a tantrum that allows us to empathize with his parents. Franken is also able to transform quickly and convincingly multiple times in short order into several other characters, heightening the hallucinatory effect. Ferrick makes his character, too, come across as more immature than malicious. Guy accidently took on more than he was capable of, didn’t rise to the challenge, and now he wants the whole episode to be over. It’s not admirable, but it’s understandable.

For such a small chamber play, McLeod has given it a complex staging. Actors appear and vanish unexpectedly, props (by Jamie Karas) seem to melt or acquire magical qualities under John Kelly’s lights in accordance with Fiona’s suggestions, and Sam Hubbard designed a few intense fights. Yee’s dream-like language goes a little overboard at times (Fiona gets put on a “leaf of absence” from work, accompanied by a visual example), but she anchors it with vivid, and often harrowing descriptions. In fact, it is the contrast between Fiona’s expressionistic lies about her son and the harshness with which she describes his disappearance that make the end of the play so effective. The play’s text is enough for us to smell Tristan. Yee has shown herself to be an interesting writer, and it’s heartening to see the National New Play Development assisting her development. In a Word’s subject matter is grim, but the delivery is palatable, and it provides a lot to think about.

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By Annie Baker

Directed by Dexter Bullard

Produced by Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago

Annie Baker Goes to the Dark Side

Annie Baker is a relatively young playwright who has become known for her ear for dialogue. Her “Vermont Plays” Body Awareness, The Aliens, and Circle Mirror Transformation were quiet and captured the absurd humor of mundane conversations, while demonstrating her keen sense of perception. They were also deeply humanistic; each of them is about lovable losers in New England who grow before the audience by bonding with each other and gleaning bits of wisdom until they become the balanced, compassionate people most of us aspire to be. Therefore Baker’s drama The Flick, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014, is a great shock. In it, Baker uses all her familiar tools—the realistically written conversations that are mostly silences and inanities, the small, impoverished New England setting, the idiosyncratic characters—to depict the grueling process of peoples’ humanity being ground out of them. Think the Sprecher sisters’ Clockwatchers, but with sticky floors. The Flick’s Chicago premiere at Steppenwolf, under the direction of Dexter Bullard, is long and feels longer. It seems that to understand soul-crushing grind of the cinema-staff’s lives, we must be put through an abbreviated version of the same process.

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Book by Richard Greenberg

Music by Scott Frankel

Lyrics by Michael Korie

Directed by Rob Lindley

Musical Direction by Chuck Larkin

Produced by Porchlight Music Theatre, Chicago

50s Social Conflict with Meditative Music

Todd Haynes’s 2002 movie Far From Heaven was intended to be an homage to melodramatic 50s soap-opera-like movies. So when Richard Greenberg and Scott Frankel adapted it for the stage in 2013, using slow, atonal music instead of dramatic melodies was a bold choice. Which is not to say that it was a successful one. Greenberg’s book sticks closely to the movie, and in Porchlight Music Theatre’s Chicago premiere, several actors, including Summer Naomi Smart, give intelligent, well-crafted performances. But this story doesn’t feel like it benefits from being a musical, which is unfortunate, because melodramas depend more on their music for emotional impact than on how well actors convey broadly-drawn characters.

Cathy Whitaker (Smart) is a housewife in 1957 Hartford whose life is everything she had believed constituted “good.” She’s part of the resurgent middle class, her husband Frank (Brandon Springman) has an office job, she has a dutiful black maid, her kids…are a little annoying, actually, but not screwed up in any major way. But then her social status unravels in bizarre ways. Frank starts getting harassed by the police for no apparent reason Cathy can see. That doesn’t prevent a local gossip from interviewing Cathy for a human-interest story to show how respectably uninteresting she is, but during the interview at her house, Cathy sees a strange black man in the yard, and shouts at him. The man, Raymond Deagan (Evan Tyrone Martin), is the son of the groundskeeper, who died suddenly. Cathy’s apology and expression of condolences gets her written up in the rag as a woman who is “nice to negroes,” and her friends start not-so-nicely teasing her for being a radical. Cathy is also surprised while talking to them to learn that it is normal for men to keep having sex with their wives after they have children.

One day, after feeling weird about her nascent friendship with Raymond and guilty over keeping her maid from her own family, Cathy goes to Frank’s work to deliver his dinner, and finds him kissing another man. It seems Frank regularly goes cruising the streets, but this time, found a man at the office in a similar situation to himself. Cathy is understandably hurt and insists that Frank undergo conversion therapy, and he agrees to, even though his psychologist outright tells him that it won’t work. It doesn’t, and their relationship declines in an ugly manner. Cathy’s friendship with Raymond is also blossoming, which invites hostility from both the black and white sides of town. After Frank humiliates her at a party, Cathy suggests a vacation will help solve their problems, but that doesn’t work, either.

From the plot description, these characters don’t sound that wonderful, but Smart, Springman, and Martin sell their various conflicts. They’re products of their environment, but also trying to break free from it. Cathy is an especially reserved woman, and therefore somewhat resilient to social pressure. But she’s mostly passive, not a visionary, and doesn’t seem to have much exposure to other ways of thinking. Smart has mastered Frankel’s difficult score, and her opening song “Autumn in Connecticut” is one of the show’s highlights. Another strong piece of music is Springman’s second act “I Never Knew,” which encapsulates the whole show’s themes. Bri Sudia also gives a strong dramatic performance as Cathy’s friend Eleanor, who can see the problems lurking beneath the idyllic suburban life more clearly, but is not quite an ally. Chuck Larkin, as conductor and musical director, has assembled a large ensemble for the many chorus scenes, who perform what is written for them very well.

It is possible that Frankel’s music didn’t come through at its full potential at the performance I attended because the speakers were placed in the audience’s walk-way and were in sorry condition by the time the second act started. But his style is still a very particular taste which doesn’t do a whole lot to elevate Far From Heaven’s social issue soap-opera content, although playing it straight as melodrama may have been worse. Bill Morey’s costume designs are colorful and fun, but Grant Sabin’s sarcastic scenic design, which sets the play in a rudimentary doll house, lacks the superficial charm of Eisenhower suburbia, and the show doesn’t compare favorably with Ibsen. Far From Heaven checks off the full list of 50s social evils, but at this point of removal, without dynamic characters and dialogue, it’s hard to care a whole lot. Fans of the movie may still enjoy it, though, and fans of this kind of music will admire Smart’s voice.

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By James Still

Directed by Timothy Douglas

Produced by American Blues Theater

Playing at the Greenhouse Theater, Chicago

How to Succeed at Becoming Your Job

A common fear among young artists is that their survival jobs could wind up overtaking their aspirations. The irony is that a survival job doesn’t even have to be degrading to cause this kind of anxiety; it could even be something that, for other people, would seem highly desirable. Take, for example, the case of Alonzo Fields, the subject of James Still’s one-man play Looking Over the President’s Shoulder. Born in 1900 in the all-black town of Lyles Station, Indiana, this classically trained opera singer practically fell into the job of chief butler at the White House for twenty years. In a sensitive and captivating performance, Manny Buckley as Fields relates how he was witness to some of the most momentous events of the twentieth century and was the confidant of presidents, but never got to do what he really wanted.

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