First Look 2014
Written by Tanya Saracho, Martyna Majok,
and Joshua Conkel
Directed by Yasen Peyankov, Daniella Topol,
and Margot Bordelon
at Steppenwolf Garage, 1624 N. Halsted (map)
thru Aug 23 | tickets: $20 | more info
Check for half-price tickets
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Topnotch talent highlight works in progress
Steppenwolf Theatre Company presents
First Look Repertory of New Work
Review by Lawrence Bommer
Ambitious and admirable in its ninth summer season of alternating premieres, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s First Look Repertory of New Work boasts terrific performances and innovative stagings. But its chief goal, as the title implies, is to showcase promising playwrights in shows seen from the start. Dealing with poverty, family reconciliation, and literally dead-end desperation, the 2014 edition and its promissory plays are no departure from quality control or hopeful futures, even if two of the three selections leave more to be desired in revivals to come.
Fighting to become her own creation, Erika (McKenzie Chinn) is a pill-popping painter who was traumatized by seeing her parents die in a car crash. Erika’s spiffy new skylit apartment is Ground Zero for curious confrontations or collaborations—with her overly helpful, banjo-playing, photo-taking landlord (Shane Kenyon); her gay cousin Terrence (Desmond Gray) who studies at the University of Chicago and tries to keep the family peace; her protective-to-pushy sister Cynthia (Tamberla Perry), a real estate mogul intent on building a boutique hotel on the North Side; and—the play’s butt—Erika’s control-freak brother-in-law (James T. Alfred) who’s embezzling the family finances and betraying them all in one slimy way or another.
Too often the dialogue ranges from glib to smug. The quirky characters are maddeningly inconsistent. (One moment Terrence will never speak to Erika again, then several scenes later it’s as if their fight never happened: Of course families forgive, but not without some settlement.) Worse, the play implies that a loved one’s blackmail can excuse her fornicating with a near relation. Erika is clearly damaged goods, but the formulaic assumption that healing comes from plot devices is unworthy of the author. Saracho just pulls the plug out on her play, so we have to work overtime to consider it completed. Too much unresolved rehab.
Persuasively directed by Margot Bordelon and deeply indebted to Marsha Norman’s ’Night Mother (even in the sound of the title), Joshua Conkel’s 70-minute, two-person Okay, Bye is a mostly engrossing depiction of two addicted women, former high school classmates in the 90s whose lives took different turns to the same bottles of booze. A deadpan serious Brenda Barrie plays perky, 34-year-old, “goody-goody” single girl Jenny who bumptiously decides to make Lara Phillips’ Meg, a deadpan serious homeless survivor and “alternative,” her “project” and herself her sponsor. The best-laid plans of mice and men…
Briefly reverting to high school frolics they never shared, they stage a slumber party at Jenny’s trendy condo. They make popcorn, watch “Pretty in Pink” and improvise a truer ending for Molly Ringwald’s character: Confessions abound and, slowly and beautifully, Meg allows herself to be loved. We briefly see both what they used to be and, more poignantly, might have been—to each other and themselves.
But this improvised A.A. intervention nearly goes south as the ladies open up a bit too much about their separate but equal “dark nights of the soul.” It’s enough to send passive-aggressive Meg into her bleakest mood swing, just as Jenny seems surprisingly compliant to her former friend’s imminent self-destruction.
As the play comes dangerously close to romanticizing suicide, it seems to cop out– with an ending that’s clearly meant to distinguish itself from Norman’s more ruthless “endgame.” This failure of nerve retroactively weakens the entire work.
The best work in progress at this stage is Martyna Majok’s powerfully presented 90-minute Ironbound, feelingly shaped by Daniella Topol. Steeped in the telling details of one woman’s unrelenting poverty and neediness across 22 years (in scenes set in 2014, 1992 and 2008), it consists of angry encounters at the same Newark bus stop near a soon-to-be-shuttered paper factory. Lusia Strus is characteristically devastating as Polish immigrant Darja, an abandoned single mom whose life is run down like her surroundings.
In gritty, raging scenes with the three men in her life, we see Darja as a factory worker, caretaker and cleaning lady. She’s determined to get—and fated to lose—her slice of the American pie, plagued with constant worries about rent, child care, insurance, and the need for wheels. (Well, at least she didn’t lose her arm on the job, as happened to a friend who momentarily was fantasizing about a better life…)
The men are philandering Tommy (Paul D’Addario), a randy, middle-aged mailman who gives and takes equally from the frustrated 42-year-old Darja; 20-year-old Max (Billy Fenderson), Darja’s Polish-émigré husband and a blues musician bent on getting to Chicago, with or without the child they share; and, very briefly, teen Vic (Nate Santana), a trust-fund hustler from Seton Hall Prep who befriends the 34-year-old Darja in a too-rare case of the kindness of strangers.
Proud but also ashamed, Strus’ dynamic, ever-struggling Darja is on her proverbial own: Though she’s no Mother Courage, this flinty fighter’s survival struggle is the strongest thing on this busy stage beneath a garage.
Rating: ★★★
First Look 2014 continues through August 23rd at Steppenwolf Garage, 1624 N. Halsted (map). See website for schedule. Tickets are $20, and are available by phone (312-335-1650) or online here (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at Steppenwolf.org. (Running time: approximately 90 minutes per show, no intermission)
Photos by Emily Schwartz
artists
cast
Hushabye
James T. Alfred (Brian), McKenzie Chinn (Erika), Desmond Gray (Terrence), Shane Kenyon (Jackson), Tamberla Perry (Cynthia).
Ironbound
Paul D’Addario (Tommy), Billy Fenderson (Max), Nate Santana (Vic), Lusia Strus (Darja).
Okay, Bye
Brenda Barrie (Jenny), Lara Phillips (Meg)
behind the scenes
Yasen Peyankov, Daniella Topol, Margot Bordelon (directors), Chelsea Warren (scenic design), JR Lederle (lighting design), Chris LaPorte (sound design) Rachel Laritz (costume design, Hushabye), Sally Dolembo (costume design, Ironbound), Emily Tarleton (costume design,Okay, Bye), Erica Daniels (casting), Derek Matson (dramaturg, Hushabye), Kathryn Zukaitis (dramaturg, Ironbound), Jenni Page-White (dramaturg, Okay, Bye), Cassie Calderone (stage manager, Hushabye), Briana Jo Fahey (stage manager, Ironbound), Jon Nook (stage manager, Okay, Bye), Kelsey Wilk (asst. director, Okay, Bye), Jerrell L. Henderson (asst. director, Hushabye), Andrew Hobgood (asst. director, Ironbound), Ivy Reid (asst. stage manager, Okay, Bye), Kathleen Dickinson (asst. stage manager, Hushabye), Mary Hungerford (asst. stage manager, Ironbound), Emily Schwartz (photos)
14-0824, 14-0825, 14-0826
