Playwright: Cándido Tirado At: Teatro Vista at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave. Phone: 312-666-4659;$25. Runs through: Dec. 4
Déjà vu is the phenomenon of remembering what you never experienced. Cándido Tirado's parable is based in its inversecall it "aprés vu"a tricky premise, and if your brain isn't strapped in securely at the outset, you won't have a clue where you are when the story takes an existential turn.
Our tale opens at the wake of the drug-dealing ghetto youth known to his intimates as Shine, recently shot and killed by his lifelong comrade, Thug, the latter now imprisoned. The deceased's ghost hovers nearby as Mimic, the third in this fraternal trio, bitterly regrets not intervening to alter the courseforetold long ago in a clairvoyant visionleading to a tragic end for all involved. With this remorseful wish, time suddenly reverses direction, spooling backwards to reveal how three poor, but fundamentally honest, boys came to grow into the self-destructive criminals they became. As they approach the crucial moment that will determine their futures, however, the chronological orientation of our narrative is suddenly called into question.
Is what we are seeing a flashback of irrevocable deeds embraced in haste by young men who see in illegal money their escape from poverty and the fulfillment of their ambitions? (Mimic wants to go to acting school, Shine wants to open a recording studio, Thug wants to give his child and her mother a comfortable life.) Alternatively, is it a flash-forward, its participants still endowed with the opportunity to bring their individual talents to less dangerous money-making employment? "It's only for a little while," they tell themselves, oblivious to the ironic tactical similarities of capitalistic enterprises on both sides of the law.
Regina Garcia's scenic design provides us temporal guidance by means of slide projections indicating "hours/days/months earlier," but playgoers who don't read tagger-script have only the performances of Steve Casillas, Jesse David and Marvin Quijada to keep them located in Tirado's multi-dimensional dramatic universe. As in real life, the transformation from scrapping and "snapping" adolescents to trigger-nervous fugitives occurs in deceptively small steps, but under Ricardo Gutierrez's direction, each player exhibits a precision-crafted vocal and physical presence easily permitting us to track the progress (or retrogression) of his perceptions in a brutal world, riveting our attention right up to Tirado's unsentimental observation that, even offered a second chance, there are always those will keep to their original path.