Playwright: Gloria Bond Clunie
At: Victory Gardens Theater
Phone: ( 773 ) 871-3000; $33-$40
Runs through: Feb. 27
Bowing deeply to Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Gloria Bond Clunie's Shoes is a sweet play rather than a great one. As in Wilder's ground-breaking 1938 work, a young woman untimely taken looks back on the mundane events of life and realizes how precious they are, and how fragile all things human seem to be.
What lifts Shoes above mere imitation is that it's based on the life of Carol Robertson, who became a footnote in history when she was killed at the age of 14. She died in an infamous incident of the modern civil-rights struggle, the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala. An adolescent myself, I vividly remember the headlines and horror at this hateful desecration of life.
Clunie's research and writing reveal a bright, fun-loving, shoe-crazy girl eager for her first high heels. Her life revolves around school, church, family, her best friend and a gradual awakening to new possibilities for young African-Americans. In other words, Carol was a normal kid. Indeed, that sweet normalcy, the innocence retained, the possibilities lost are precisely what Clunie mourns in this elegiac work that's complete with a Clarence-like angel in training ( named Cephus, a young African victim of revolutionary violence ) and a heavenly gospel choir.
However, ordinary lives don't make interesting drama, and the most interesting fact of Robertson's brief life was her death. So Clunie has to reach for dramatic conflict, finding it in the striving for closure by Carol's parents and the ghostly Carol herself, all tied into the symbolic shoes of the title.
Deprived of their daughter's body ( she was blown to bits, as Clunie describes in language of poetic horror ) , the parent's search for some physical evidence that can trigger their tears and grief.
It's thin drama that Clunie fleshes out with music, Cephus' backstory ( it doesn't really add much ) and effective character turns such as Grandma's tribute to young legs and sweet butter, played with scene-stealing delight by veteran Jacqueline Williams. The play benefits from a solid mostly veteran cast under Andrea J. Dymond's steady, well-paced direction. Linara Washington as Carol, Kenn E. Head and Ora Jones as her parents, Denise M. Chapman as Carol's mischievous best friend, up-and-coming Warren Jackson as Cephus all bring emotional substance to their roles. Rick Paul's turquoise-blue set of ripples and curves—as water reflects clouds—provides a flexible and surprisingly peaceful playing space.
One would like this world premiere to be bigger or deeper or less derivative. Still, Clunie has written an historical play that isn't about history but about the real people caught up in it. For those of us who remember that powerful time and those who are younger, Shoes puts a face on the footnote.