Playwright: The words of Nelson Algren,
with film and original music by John Musial
At: Lookingglass Theatre in Association
with the Museum of Contemporary Art
at the MCA, 220 E. Chicago
Phone: 312-337-0665; $25-$55
Runs through: June 29
Seas of prairie grass merge into Lake Michigan swells in the evocative opening moments of Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day. Algren's broken-nosed city on the make is the rightful star of this production, and it shines with battered, bruising poetry. In director John Musial's innovative multimedia and mesmerizing anthem to an incomparable writer and his incomparable city, you're drowning in Chicago from lights up.
Algren's prose is so vivid you can practically smell it. It's a gorgeous stink—sandlots and gin mills and no-address dime burlesques and the metallic, back-of-the-tongue tang of opiate kitchens and a clean lake breeze scouring through the grime. All of this is palpable in a piece where words, photography, video and music merge with the grace of running water. The music is crucial, a non-verbal complement to Algren's voice and as critical to the atmosphere of the piece as the subtly nasal Midwestern twang actor Thomas J. Cox uses to embody the words and persona of Algren.
Composer David Pavkovic's soundscape is a brew of late nights sustained by jazz and cigarettes and sunshine subsumed by drafty hustlers' junctions. As Kevin O'Donnell and Bob Lovecchio perform on various forms of percussion and bass, whole worlds unspool. The hardscrabble arteries between Gary's steel mills and Chicago's red-lit rains, SRO studios where working women convulse unto dying in vain attempts to kick bad habits, and deserted, defiant El stops where nobody stops anymore—they all become as vivid as life here. It's music to accompany a 'cocksure Johnson of a town' where—to paraphrase Algren—men come from everywhere to see how close they can come to killing each other and still stay out of jail. With a mix of timbre and strings, O'Donnell and Lovecchio create a gliding, stuttering urban rhythm. And not just any urban rhythm: While it's impossible to describe sounds in text, suffice to say Musial's score all hardscrabble, banged-up and slightly soiled Chicago. You'd never mistake the score as the sounds of gleaming Chrysler Building chrome and New York City or the crisp, ocean-washed bustle of San Francisco. This is our town, pure and unwashed.
The third major component to For Keeps and a Single Day—and on equally important as the orchestration and almost a crucial as the words—is Musial's videography. It's a silvery collage of narrative featurettes and atmospherics, a dreamlike, uncannily accurate portrait of the city from the coast to the interior and back again.
Musial makes it all look easy, merging multiple art forms into a single, compelling and utterly haunting production.
