Playwright: Jack Gilhooley
At: Steep Theatre, 3902 N. Sheridan Road
Phone: (773) 458-0722; $15
Runs through: June 26
The dialect locates us in Tennessee, but we could just as easily be in the rust belt, the great plains or any region whose youthful populaces are stifled by boredom and inertia. Unfulfilled scholarships, a hitch or two in the service, or visits to city-dwelling relatives might offer them glimpses of a world beyond their immediate environment, but their destiny is to remain safely mired in the security of familiar values.
The adored Hollis 'Speed' Constant, after whom the town's race-track is named, and the despised Charlene Drake, now married to an Englishman, were the exceptions. Both these icons (whom we never see) have come home for this special weekend event, and their former peers have turned out in force. The left-behinds are the usual rural assortment of salesclerks, waitresses, gas pumpers, auto mechanics and an obligatory halfwit, with a lone songwriter hinting at ambitions now thwarted by single motherhood. While they lounge in the bleachers waiting for their champion, they drink, smoke dope, recount many-times-told stories and swap the kind of amiable abuse that comes of long and resigned fraternity.
In an age of cable television and Wal-Marts, this apathy might seem rare and foreign to us, but when Time Trials premiered in 1975, counterculture values had not yet penetrated those corners of America too isolated even to have seen The Last Picture Show at the cinema. And playwright Jack Gilhooley is not out to ridicule these social castaways from his position of privilege. By the time each of his waifs have faced their moment of crisis—or not—we can see, with the clear hindsight born of OUR privilege, glimmers of hope for dreams hitherto deferred.
This Steep Theatre production, mounted in their newly licensed playhouse, likewise scorns easy hee-haw mockery. Under Lauren Golanty's deft direction, each actor delves their character's struggle with pain, despair and self-destruction slow and erosive, or swift and final. Native Big-Bender Sadie Rogers keeps the accents geographically and culturally precise as the jug of T.J. Swann comprising the preferred vintage in these parts, while Tony Adams' sound design puts us right in the thick of the automotive parade, car after car proudly going nowhere fast.
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