Playwright: Andrew White (writer), Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman (composers)At: Lookingglass Theatre, Water Tower Pumping Station. Tickets: 312-337-0665; www.lookingglasstheatre.org; $34-$68. Runs through: July 29
On July 24, 1915, a ship with a history of instability rolled onto its side while docked in the Chicago River. In just 20 feet of water 844 people died, mostly trapped in cabins below deck. The Eastland Disasterapparently unknown to many present-day Chicagoansis the subject of this world premiere musical.
This worst-ever Great Lakes maritime calamity has been likened to the Titanic three years earlier (April 1912), but they're nothing alike. The Eastland tipped in seconds, giving passengers no opportunities to react nobly or not. The ship wasn't lost: Within weeks it was righted, remodeled, renamed and used for another 30 years. The Eastland was never pronounced unsinkable so the hubris of mankind vs. naturewhich makes the Titanic such a moral and dramatic taleis missing. There's nothing glamorous about the Eastland Disaster, no maiden voyage, no roster of rich and famous passengers. It was ordinary and so were its passengers, most of them employees of the vast Western Electric works (makers of Bell Telephone equipment) and their families, on a company-hosted lake cruise.
And that's the point for authors White, Pluess and Sussman: They've created a blue-collar musical as modest and unglamorous as the folks who died on the Eastland. It's not a Broadway-style show with big songs and choreography, nor does it offer many details of what happened. You'll have to use Google to learn the Eastland was docked at Clark Street, and was one of three steamers taking Western Electric employees that day, and was known as the Speed Queen of the Great Lakes.
Indeed, with the exception of Mara Blumenfeld's costumes in full shirtwaist/Gibson Girl mode, there's nothing about the physical production that says "1915." The same holds true for the score, which is broadly traditional and folkloric in flavor featuring acoustic string instruments and piano. The contrapuntal writing is quite amazing in the few choral numbers where it reaches full flower, such as "Only the River Remains."
The result is moving but rarely exciting: a show focusing on a few real people, a few fictional ones and the patterns of love, loss, longing and family which the disaster interrupted. In director Amanda Dehnert's ethereal staging, the audience is seated in church pews within a Chautauqua tent (suiting the traditional score), as people seem to float before you, drifting in and out of Christine A. Binder's pools of light. Dripping-wet clothing hauled from iron washtubs hauntingly represents the dead.
You may leave with musical impressions but not humming a tune. You'll remember the boy whose body lay unclaimed for weeks, and "the human frog" who held his breath like Houdini to dive repeatedly for the living and dead but you won't leave with a message, for there's little to understand beyond the frequently arbitrary falling out of life. This is an elegy for the Eastland, not an exclamation pointan ache rather than a terrible wound.