THEATER REVIEW: "Local Wonders" ★★½ Through Jan. 9 at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave. $25-30 at 630-457-1074 or www.localwondersmusical.com.
The good people of the Great Plains are not overly given to introspection—the landscapes of Nebraska and Iowa have not been oft-immortalized in rhapsodic sonnets. Perhaps that’s why the writing of the poet Ted Kooser—which finds profound beauty and complexity in a land that retains the ruts of every covered wagon that once passed through on route to someplace else—feels at once forceful, fresh and potent.
Kooser, who was named Poet Laureate in 2004 and whose work is the subject of a new show in Chicago from the aptly named Full Sky Productions, is neither a pretentious post-modernist nor a romantic sentimentalist. Rather, he’s a clear-eyed, populist poet of the prairie and an extraordinary writer who understands the innate connection between the vicissitudes of life itself and the geography of the place in which that life is lived.
“We live in Garland, Nebraska,” goes one typically straight-forward line in “Local Wonders,” “and our nearest neighbors are Coyotes.” So it goes on from there.
If you hail from Iowa and Nebraska, especially the southeastern reaches (a persistently low-rise range that Kooser a tad facetiously, calls “The Bohemian Alps”), and you find yourself missing home this holiday time, then “Local Wonders” should offer some balm. As I watched the show Thursday night, I kept thinking how underexposed and under-read Kooser is in Chicago, the capital of the Middle West. “Local Wonders,” which is mostly based on a 2002 collection of Kooser’s essays, will certainly send you scurrying off in search of more of his work.
Penned by Virginia Smith and Paul Amandes, and directed by Smith, “Local Wonders” was first seen at the Nebraska Repertory Theatre in 2006. The essays that make up most of the show were penned not long after Kooser (who is still alive and well) received a diagnosis of cancer, and thus began to see his surroundings in a new light, infused by his sudden sense of his own mortality.
In the show, Amandes plays Kooser (many of the lines come directly from the poet’s own words) and the folk-singer Anne Hills plays Kathleen Rutledge, the former editor of the Lincoln Journal Star and Kooser’s wife. Amandes has penned a suite of songs that complement Kooser’s writing; Amandes and Hills perform them between the essays and poems and the little snapshots of the couple’s life together. James Robinson-Parran accompanies on piano.
It is tremendously rewarding to spend some quality time with Kooser’s writing, and it’s clear that everyone here is deeply dedicated to the work of their subject. But as a piece of theater, “Local Wonders” still needs a lot more work.
The idea of using Kooser’s diagnosis—and the weeks that followed—as the dramatic lynch-pin of the evening is very sound. But that theme tends to drop away as the show progresses, without answering all the questions raised. It feels like everyone backed away from getting too personal.And while Amandes’ songs—at once sweet, harsh and wise—are an ideal complement for Kooser’s words, they seem short, fractured and yet to fully embody what a song in a piece of musical theater really needs to achieve.
Amandes and Hills don’t have a fake note in their bodies, but Hills is more a folk-singer, a distinguished one, than an actress. And the show is still too loose and casual. One suspects that everyone involved is a bit too much in love with Kooser’s work for their own good—and it leads to a kind of beatification of their man that this actual work eschews.
In other words, the piece needs more of the darker, more complex side of Kooser. It needs more tension, more bite, and more theatrical urgency. If one is to see a marriage on a stage, one wants it to be truthful—here Hill’s Kathleen spends most of her time gazing admiringly at her wise husband.
Perchance this director and these actors might do better to step down from the actual staging and performing of their piece and concentrate instead on deepening its structure, adding to its potentially lovely score, finding the right visual metaphors and discovering more of the wonders in what could be a really gorgeous tribute to the Midwest and a great literary Midwesterner.