'A Twist of Water' by Route 66: A rare, four-star play sensing the current of a changing Chicago
THEATER REVIEW: "A Twist of Water" ★★★★ Through March 26 by Route 66 Theatre Company at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes; Tickets: $25 at 773-975-8150 or www.theaterwit.org
• Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel on the arts: Dance, gritty theater and a shift towards neighborhoods (posted March 4)
Now through June 26 at the Mercury Theater, 3745 N. Southport Ave.; $38.50-$44.50 at www.mercurytheaterchicago.com
Early in “A Twist of Water,” the truly special new Chicago play from a young writer named Caitlin Montanye Parrish, a struggling Chicago history teacher tries to explain to his kids the origins of their city. He wants them — and, by extension us — to understand how Chicago has always been a place of risk, rebuilding and reinvention. A town devoted to change. He wants them to understand that Chicago has always been about the water. He wants them to wonder, as Carl Sandburg once wondered, whether a city of brick and glass can ever really love you back.
“It's snowing,” he starts out in his little story of a city's first settler (and, aptly enough, it's starting to snow as I write this review, late at night).
“Our friend reaches a body of water that stretches past the horizon,” the teacher goes on. “A could-be ocean. Snow is falling onto the beaches, and something occurs to our friend: ‘I could have a home here.' Try to understand our friend's unearned hope. Because everything that follows, all our history, all of us? We wouldn't be here without that hope. It was less than a stone's throw between a forgotten death by the lake and a new home.”
And then there's a pause. The teacher, honestly played by Stef Tovar, has recently lost his partner to an accident in that same body of water, and now is raising their angry, grieving adopted teenager, unpretentiously played by the sad-eyed Falashay Pearson, entirely alone. He is having a rough, rough time in Chicago, even though he has never lived anywhere else. But he has hope. He is, after all, a Chicagoan.
“We are the children of a risk taken,” he says, trying to listen to his own words. “But before there was a home, there was a seemingly uncrossable stretch of ice.”
It has loomed large this winter. Especially for those of us who were stupid enough to be out in a terrifying blizzard. A blizzard unearned.
Parrish's play — which reaches with more passion, wisdom and lyricism towards civic definition (and redefinition) than any Chicago work I've seen in a long, long time — captures this precise moment of Chicago's re-invention with such astonishing alacrity that you want Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel and those jockeying to share his power to put down the reports, resumes and briefing books this Saturday night and head, not to party with the Bulls, but over to Belmont Avenue where they might ponder the living soul of the paradoxical town they will soon be leading, and to whose citizens they will need to articulate a vision that goes deeper than parking meters.
Since Parrish's starting point is as much Abraham Lincoln as Sandburg, they could pick up the governor on the way. They would witness one of Chicago's greatest assets: artistic self-examination moving from generation to generation. Performed intimately, affordably, to whoever cares to show up.
But the thing they would (one hopes) see laid out the most clearly by Parrish here would be this: Changing families live out their little lives, their often tough lives, against the backdrop of Chicago history — represented here by some muted but powerful projections of Chicago's past from the gifted designer John Boesche and accompanied by a haunting original score from Lindsay Jones. That is the greatest of several achievements here by director Erica Weiss (credited as “co-creator”) and the Route 66 Theatre Company, which was smart enough to nurture this play. I suppose some might find this piece small or sentimental, although this is a sentimental town of neighborhoods and Parrish makes some sudden surprising turns toward the big and dark. It should lose 10 minutes, but then most new plays should. It occasionally reveals itself as the work of the young. None of that will bother you much. This is a piece that does for Chicago something like what Armistead Maupin (“Tales of the City”) did for San Francisco a generation ago.
Parrish and Weiss will show you the broad civic context. And you will see the messiness of our modern-day families. The teacher is wondering whether he can fall in love with a younger man (played in clear-eyed fashion by Alex Hugh Brown). The teenager is wondering whether the loss of one of her two dads, the better of her two dads in her eyes, means she should try and meet her biological mother. That mother is played, fearlessly, by Lili-Anne Brown, so you'll thus know that she does. But it is not as the girl thinks it will be. She ends up back by the water, where everything starts and ends for Chicago and these Chicagoans.
The main point of brooding contention for the teacher and his daughter (and thus the nut of the play) is the matter that he did not force his way into a hospital that denied him a partner's rights, sending his daughter in alone to deal with a dead man. That would be different now, he sighs ruefully at one point, seemingly referencing the new Illinois law recognizing civil unions, a law that came too late for him but that changed Chicago nonetheless.
Would “A Twist of Water” carry such force at another time, when there had not just been an election, when change was not so much in the air? Perhaps not. But as Chicago has always known, somewhere deep in its grumbling collective belly, it is always about the present moment. Parrish has caught that truth, beautifully, in the wind off the lake.
I've seen readings of this show twice and have been blown away by it's extraordinary power, heart, and intelligence each time.
For anyone that loves this city- it's past, present, future, IT'S SPIRIT- SEE THIS SHOW!!
Posted by: Emily Reusswig | February 25, 2011 at 02:25 PM
"Parrish has caught that truth, beautifully, in the wind off the lake."
I love Chicago and I love this magnificent Play. Caitlin Montanye Parrish is a gifted playwright. It would not surprise me to see her running down the aisle at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood to receive an Oscar in the near future.
Posted by: Patrick L Duke | February 25, 2011 at 09:55 PM
See you don't have to be Goodman, ChiShake or Swolf to produce a 4-star play. Long live the small, passionate, powerful Chicago theatre.
Posted by: Forrest T | February 26, 2011 at 01:07 PM
An unexpected surprise, the kind that is exciting and makes me feel like I have made a discovery - good script and well executed. Telling everyone I see to go check it out. Can't wait to see more from this playwright and this theater company.
Posted by: DebG | February 26, 2011 at 04:33 PM
Apparently, Rahm reads the theater reviews. Rahm's seeing the play right now!
Posted by: Dave | February 26, 2011 at 08:13 PM
Chris - Rahm must have read your review as he was at tonight's performance. I loved the play. Thanks for encouraging the Mayor elect and everyone else to see it.
Posted by: Barry T. | February 26, 2011 at 10:10 PM
Saw the show last night (along with the Mayor Elect :) Excellent show, I totally believed the relationships between the characters. The simple set was augmented with video projection that indicated where you were, and it worked well.
When, at the end, they announced that Rahm was there, the actors were clearly surprised and delighted. How nice that they got to have that experience!
Posted by: leek | February 27, 2011 at 02:37 PM
Rahm saw the play last night and, according to the Wall Street Journal, "“I thought it was great". So glad that politicians care about art and know a good play when they see one!! click (http://on.wsj.com/hGgSba)
Posted by: Alex | February 27, 2011 at 03:06 PM
Just saw your comment Barry T. I am jealous!!!! How great to have seen that experience unfold!!!
Posted by: Alex | February 27, 2011 at 03:08 PM
I saw the play yesterday. It's a beautifully written, beautifully acted play, profoundly moving.
Posted by: Madeline | March 07, 2011 at 02:41 PM
This was a very moving, and also (at points) very funny play that you should definitely go see, and I congratulate all the huge talents involved in it for its well-deserved success and acclaim. Like the actors, you'll probably cry, and those tears will be well-earned. I hope a couple of friendly criticisms aren't out of order.
I found the Chicago history lessons to be a bit clunky, a bit hokey, and I wasn't convinced of the thematic connections between them and the potent personal drama. I *got* them (I think), but I'm not sure how illuminating or genuine they were. They seemed a bit, I don't know, haphazard, awkward, both unhoned and overbearing, for my taste.
Liam was the most realistic fictional teacher I've seen this side of The Class. Tovar's soliloquies, though, did not seem like actual high school history lessons. I'm not sure they were even meant to be, but toning down their "lyricism" (or breathlessness) a bit, and having them resemble actual high school history lessons, might help. Perhaps reducing this whole aspect of the play to just a couple of realistic history lessons that underline some themes, in a way that's both more sharp and less insistent, would work better, at least for someone like me.
And I speak as someone with a long-standing interest in Chicago history -- someone who's into all this stuff. Notwithstanding that interest, though, I recognize that hometown enthusiasm is a tough emotion on which to build great human insight, because, frankly, it's small-bore and sentimental, in the sense of artificial, like sports fandom or ethnic pride.
For example, someone like me, life-long hometown enthusiast and booster that I am, cringes at sentiments like "Never a City So Real." Realer than what, exactly? Fake cities? The play too often exploits that sort of sentiment, which is dubious as truth or insight. Are we to suppose that because of the exploits of people long dead who lived in an entirely different world from our own that "we," by virtue of our common latitude and longitude, are possessed of a unique river-reversing "character" or "spirit"? That's all sort of silly, isn't it, and not the sort of thing one takes seriously. Chicago is a big place, a cosmopolitan place, where the people are as different from one another as they are from the people of other cities or from the people who occupied this land years ago.
So I wonder to what extent the play's Chicago backdrop -- or, at least, the size of it, or this expression of it -- ended up adding a sense of gratuitous parochialism and strained pseudo-profundity to an otherwise remarkably genuine and sympathetic human drama. I couldn't help but feel that the playwright was going all out here to make some literary connections that didn't quite work, seemed forced, and detracted a bit from all the good stuff.
Also, I thought that the drama could have been built up in a more gradual manner. We glimpse so many of the main conflicts and issues perhaps a bit too early, and some first act scenes feel like we're treading water, so to speak, but, so long as you stay for the whole thing, you forgive this problem.
And there's so much to love here. I loved the portrayal of real teachers. I loved the portrayal of a real "alternative family," the alternative nature of which is, in the context of the play, unremarkable. I loved the portrayal of a real adolescent girl who, unlike so many adolescents in drama, was not a lame stereotype but rather a genuine personality (in progress). I loved the portrayal of the real relationship between the two men. The humor came in just the right doses, usually from Liam, and was very funny. I liked these people, I believed them, and I cared about them.
Posted by: JakeH | March 13, 2011 at 01:48 AM
My wife and I saw the play last night. It is a tremendous new work that made
us proud to live in a city that has such history and strives to maintain its
status as a cultural destination. The play has great depth and is not only
thought provoking, but also poignant. Acting is top-notch, staging and music
very good. Theatre does a great job and it seemed as if the audience was
full of family members. I have read that this play is leaving soon and highly
reccommend to everyone.
Posted by: Thomas J Taaaffe | March 13, 2011 at 02:21 PM
We saw the play last night with our son who is taking a high school course on the history of Chicago. He enjoyed it, but during the intermission he mentioned that he was keeping track of errors he thought he spotted in the play. Noticing his reactions to the characters and the story was fascinating and he came up with better interpretations of the connections between Chicago and rest of the the story than I did.
As a life long Chicagoan who has walked at least the north half of the length of the lake front many times in all kinds of weather, and gone to locations along the rocks for solace at times in my life,I really enjoyed the sets and the creative use of projections. And I enjoyed the history which to me seemed divorced from the story. As a former Chicago language arts and social studies teacher teacher, I would have to say things have certainly changed...or maybe not.
The real revelation of this play was the magnificent performance of Falashay Pearson, who remained caught up in emotion during the bows at the end of the play.
One carp: Chris, Why do you talk about Chicagoan's "little lives?"
This is a good play, but I think the review is a bit over the top, Three Stars max.
Posted by: Leonard Grossman | March 13, 2011 at 04:45 PM
This play had some very strong moments, but any many ways did not seem authentic. Perhaps, if the drama unfolded in a gradual manner, I would have believed it. Three Stars max from me as well.
Posted by: Dell | March 15, 2011 at 08:59 AM