Playwright: Amy Herzog . At: Northlight Theater at the North Shore Center for the Arts, 9501 N. Skokie Blvd. in Skokie. Tickets: 847-673-6300; www.northlight.org; $25-$75. Runs through: Oct. 20
Like Belleville, Amy Herzog's play performed recently at Steppenwolf, 4000 Miles boasts all the elements you need for a stupid play—a nonagenarian granny with dentures and a hearing aid, a self-righteous twentysomething youth, an earnest global crusader, a pampered heiress, an eccentric neighbor heard only over the telephone, a sibling existing solely as a voice on a skype screen, and did I mention the dope-smoking scene? Unlike Belleville, however, Herzog never allows these characters to behave stupidly, instead endowing each one with dignity, depth and a universally intriguing backstory. Celibate playgoers may have faced obstacles in their efforts to identify with Belleville's distraught spouses, but who cannot relate to the existential anomie of individuals re-adjusting to their place in the cosmos?
Our play begins with the 3 a.m. arrival of Leo, bicycle and camp gear in tow, at the door of his grandmother Vera's apartment in the Greenwich Village district of Manhattan. Before he is put to bed in his late grandsire's room, we learn that Leo has just finished a long-distance ride from Seattle—alone, his traveling companions having been left behind. We also learn that he isn't staying with his girl friend and that he doesn't want his mother told where he is. In the morning we are apprised of Vera's wellness-check arrangement with the recluse living across the hall and of a family crisis triggered by Leo's having kissed his adopted sister in a hallucinogen-fueled moment of abandon (it's Seattle, remember?).
Having set up her questions, Herzog proceeds to answer them, very slowly—not like many playwrights, deliberately invoking irrelevancies and red herrings in order to produce an avalanche of whodunit-style revelations in the final minutes, but precisely as people confronting hitherto-unconsidered issues hesitate to declare their conclusions before weighing the evidence. Information can spring from unexpected sources, too—a tipsy art-school airhead that Leo brings home one evening, for example, who suddenly discloses an ethnographic lineage that causes her shy swain to suddenly view his own kin in a different light.
Kimberly Senior's direction reinforces Herzog's intelligent approach, keeping her cast reined in well short of cutesy stereotypes. The action includes no shouting matches, cataclysmic reversals or broken crockery, and fans of Mary Ann Thebus will find few easy laughs in the acerbic ex-communist Vera. Within Herzog's deceptively minimalist landscape, however, dwell a wide spectrum of American individuals unconventional, but immediately recognizable, nevertheless.
