Playwright: Leigh Fondakowski. At: TimeLine Theatre at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont Ave. Tickets: 773-327-5252 or www.timelinetheatre.com; $38-$51. Runs through Dec. 19
The worst oil spill in U.S. history is disturbingly re-examined in Spill, by writer-director Leigh Fondakowski. It's a detailed docudrama about the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and TimeLine Theatre is presenting the Chicago premiere of the revised 2014 work. It's all a very sobering experience.
Spill carries authority because the play's dialogue was constructed directly from testimony and interviews that Fondakowski and Reeva Wortel conducted. So, in many ways, Spill is like Fondakowski's previous involvement in the Tectonic Theater Project's examination of the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in both The Laramie Project and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. These works also led to Fondakowski's docudrama The People's Temple, which focused on the 1978 Jonestown massacre.
Spill may be initially harder to penetrate since it has very technical drilling terms. ( A glossary is included in the program. ) Also, the nine-member ensemble's Louisiana accents are very thick. The sound acoustic in Stage 773's Thrust space isn't always ideal, either.
But Fondakowski efforts to put human faces on the disaster come through since she and her collaborators were able to conduct interviews with some surviving family members ( two very compellingly played by Justine C. Turner and Tim Decker ) of the 11 men who were killed. These men were quickly forgotten in much of the news coverage in the spill's aftermath, and Spill won't let you forget the human cost of itespecially with Chris Rickett portraying the late rig worker Jason Anderson throughout.
Act I of Spill looks at the events leading up to the catastrophic explosion with many harrowing escape stories. ( Lighting and sound design work, respectively, by Betsy Adams and Andre Pluess help to ratchet up the tension. ) Act II of Spill looks largely at the aftermath with plenty of attention paid to the costly environmental destruction, questionable clean up efforts and anger-inducing Congressional investigations.
If Fondakoski's direction of Spill's fine chameleon-like ensemble comes off as a tad too clinical at times, the approach keeps things grounded with a what-was-said truthfulness. The spare sets, by Sarah Lambert, also keep things focused on the human side of things, although disturbing video clips are skillfully deployed now and then by projection designer Mike Tutaj.
Spill is very effective since it isn't afraid to examine difficult questions or to be even-handed in looking the world's demands for oil. Yet Spill is also an uncomfortable outing since it highlights how we are all, in our own way, complicit in oil-related environmental disasters and that there are no easy answers on how the globe should wean itself off of oil.