Playwright: Brett Neveu
At: American Theater Company,
1909 W. Byron
Phone: (773) 929-1031; $25-$30
Runs through: March 21
With American Dead, Chicago playwright Brett Neveu places himself in a league of other careful small town chroniclers, such as Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, Larry McMurtry, and William Inge. Neveu, who is emerging as one of Chicago's more gifted playwrights, has down the placid boredom, the lingering hopelessness, and the inertia that holds people to a place long after it has anything left to offer.
Lewie (in a strong, poignant rendering by James Leaming) has little to live for and spends his days cadging drinks in the local bar and wandering around in abandoned buildings (a metaphor, perhaps, for a yearning for a life gone by). A few years before, Lewie lost his sister, Grace (Isabel Liss, quiet and powerful as someone unaware that she's dead), the town's deputy, to a convenience store robbery shooting. Lewie wrestles with coming to terms with the death of his sister (and the 16-year-old stock boy who died with her) and is haunted by her image. His only real connection, the man who was married to Grace (a sweet and bumbling performance by Doug McCarthy) is leaving town with his new wife (the always spot-on Jen Avery), and the final thread that binds him to his sister will vanish.
How Lewie puts the ghost of his sister to rest is at the center of this often appropriately flat and telling play. Neveu's work here is deceptively simple, and people's yearnings and collisions with loss are expressed in simple terms, in conversations about family photos, outdoor grilles, unemployment, and mundane memories of summers past. Although a subplot involving a new man in town with information about Grace's killers sheds light on what happened during the robbery, the catharsis for Lewie—and the letting go of his sister's memory—really comes when he is at the end of his rope, when he has done all his mourning and comes to the sad conclusion that there is nowhere else to go but back on a path to the living.
Edward Sobel deftly directs an outstanding ensemble here, which give uniformly inspired and credible performances. Keith Pitts' set design perfectly mirrors the details of a town in decline, and uses American Theater Company's modest playing space to craft a very real, three-pronged world. Michelle Habeck's lighting is appropriately moody, and Ray Nardelli's sound design is simple and evocative.
American Dead is one of the finest original works I've seen at ATC, and heralds the arrival of an important voice in American theater. It's not a perfect outing (it could use some script doctoring and tightening), but it's much better than much of what passes for theater downtown. Definitely recommended.