The Chicago Landmark Project: Points on city's grid connect in striking plays
THEATER REVIEW: The Chicago Landmark Project ★★★ Through July 10 (Programs A and B rotate) at Greenhouse Theatre Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.; running time: 1 hour 20 minutes (each program); tickets: $15-$30 at 773-404-7336 or theatreseven.org.
The Chicago Landmark Project begins with a turn-of-the-20th-century man — a very ordinary Chicagoan with a knack for persistence and a taste for order — sitting with his uncertain wife in a little rowboat on Lake Michigan. She wants out of the summer dirt and noise of the filthy, turn-of-the-century city; he is plotting a revolutionary change in thinking.
“You know the saying that all roads lead to Rome,” he says (the actor Joe Zarrow’s eyes are ablaze). “What if, in our city, all streets lead to State and Madison?”
If, like me, you have an endless appetitive for Chicago history trivia, you’ll recognize that the romantic dreamer in the boat is one Edward P. Brennan, who, despite no official right or standing whatsoever, persuaded the Chicago City Council in the early years of the 20th century to adopt a unified street-numbering system. Brennan not only saved us endless confusion and created a plan crucial to Chicago’s explosive 20th century growth, but made possible Theatre Seven’s terrific summer project: a delightful little suite of a dozen short Chicago plays all set at, around, or about different street corners of the city — such as “63rd & Garfield,” “Division & California,” “Devon & Kedzie.”
Some — like Brett Neveu’s little comedy of hipsters in a vintage record store at Lincoln and Eastwood or Brooke Berman’s sardonic look at the humiliations risked when you walk into a designer resale store at Honore and Milwaukee — are set in the present. Others — such as Aaron Carter’s evocation of the ghosts of the Riverview Amusement Park at Belmont and Western — draw mostly from the past.
In Robert Koon’s “Navy Pier” — which brought me to tears — a father and a daughter find themselves perched on a bench on that promontory, just as the young woman is about to leave for college. “Why did you bring me to Navy Pier?” says the derision-filled daughter (smartly played by Baize Buzan), setting off a big rolling laugh in the Greenhouse Theatre Center on Saturday night, this being a question that most Chicagoans who find themselves there invariably ask. But it turns out that the dad, played by Tim Grimm, has a plan and a lesson from Navy Pier’s past, and Koon’s play manages to be as populist as the tourist trap and far deeper.
Collections of 10-minute plays or themed projects with multiple authors frequently don’t live up to one’s expectations — they’re typically up-and-down affairs and, ingested as a whole, they often come off as stretched, pretentious, dull or all three. But this show is different. Thanks not least to the great overall idea, Brian Golden and Cassy Sanders have forged a unified evening (actually, two different evenings, Program A and Program B, though they also are performed back-to-back, as I saw them) that offers as good a portrait of the diversity of this city as you can currently find. And it would be far more interesting and revealing for your out-of-town visitors than the display boards at the Willis Tower or the Hancock.
The shows also are full of fresh talent. None of the casts are doubled, so the project involves some 35 mostly young Chicago actors, most of whom I’d never seen before and quite a few of whom I look forward to seeing again. There are also a lot of teenagers in the shows — another surprise that contributes to the sense of summer freshness and the optimism on display about Chicago’s future.
Overall, I was knocked out by the quality and polish of most of the plays (there are just a couple of duds, mostly because they’re too obvious). The best ones don’t attempt great feats of civic definition but tell the story of an intersection through the people of the neighborhood, and spend a lot of time celebrating our collective sense of humor. In Marisa Wegrzyn’s “State & Madison,” the fabulous little play that kicks off Program A, we look at Brennan’s plan mostly though the restless woman who shares his boat, and who starts to worry about whether State and Madison should represent 0 on the grid, or 1. If you think about what it means to live or work at zero, you’ll get her point, and yet you also see why Brennan, a numbers man, wanted a point of total neutrality. Chicago, the little piece seems to say, works because it accommodates both of these types of people.
Shortly thereafter, Laura Jacqmin’s offbeat “Logan & Milwaukee” ponders the lot of being an official artist of the Logan Square Farmer’s Market and thus feeling some obligation to sing about vegetables. Jacqmin’s heroine, the hilarious newcomer Victoria Blade, shares much inner pain about being asked to move on when another farmer’s market “decided to go in a different direction.” No radish has to struggle like a Chicago artist.
I wish Golden and Sanders had either nixed or shortened a couple of the weaker plays and made this one terrific bill. But if you just have time for one, Program A is the one to see. That way, you’ll also get to enjoy J. Nicole Brooks’ audacious idea of creating a time-travelling street artist who kidnaps a couple of Magnificent Mile tourists and sends them back in time, not too far back, to Garfield and State, where natives and out-of-towners alike stare at all four corners of the intersection and don’t so much ponder what has happened here but what has not, and why.
Brennan, alas, could not fix everything about Chicago.
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