Playwright: Stuart Dybek
At: Walkabout Theater Company in conjunction with Lookingglass Productions at the Water Tower Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave.
Phone: ( 312 ) 337-0665; $25-$40
Runs through: Feb. 19
This Walkabout-Lookingglass collaboration is PRECISELY the kind of theatre that should have gone into the Water Tower Works' space from the day its doors opened. Adapted by Lookingglass company member Laura Eason to a trim 80 minutes, Stuart Dybek's stories of growing up in Chicago's Pilsen district is a look at the ethnic influences contributing to our city's cultural heritage—presented not as historical pageant, but a personal memoir resonating among citizens the world over struggling to make a home in a new land.
'For over a hundred years, English has been the second language in Pilsen,' says a tourist guidebook. The concentration of industry along the South Side railroads made the area between 18th and 26th streets a colony of Czech-Bohemian settlers in the years just after the Great Fire. As Polish and later, at the start of World War II, Mexican immigrants arrived looking for work, the demographic grew more heterogeneous, albeit always keeping its distance from the nearby African-American communities.
Dybek writes of these years, of a boyhood living with a war-widowed mother and eccentric grandfather. Of an adolescence roaming the streets with Latino pals, calling over the prison walls to comrades within. Of the mysterious piano-playing girl upstairs, who would eventually be banished forever by her kinfolk. And then there are the local legends, eerie and persistent as the classical myths—the Miraculous Virgin said to be enshrined in the icehouse by the tracks. The drummer whose girlfriend danced on the roof, one day falling to her death, and how her sorrowing Orpheus tried to play her ghost back to life.
Director Gary Zabinski has assembled an all-star cast led by Jeff Still, portraying the mature Dybek, with Dan Waller and Eastman Presser as his younger incarnations. Nicholas Guzman Valentin and Juan Francisco Villa illuminate the anxiety lying beneath the teenage bravado; Larry Neumann, Jr., delivers a memorable portrait of a patriarch lost in anomie; and Frederick Husar radiates presence as a street-corner philosopher. Eva Breneman keeps everyone's accents both distinct and intelligible, while Ray Nardelli's sound design invokes all the delicate magic of nostalgic retrospection.
From the moment that the curtain announcements regarding cameras and cell phones are made in THREE languages—English, Spanish and Polish—audiences know they are in a very special universe. See for yourself.