Stage Left, a classic Chicago off-Loop storefront theater, is doing itself proud in its 20th anniversary season with a well-crafted premiere production of Mia McCullough’s well-written and provocative drama, “Chagrin Falls.”
McCullough has set her story in a backwater bar in the middle of nowhere, a gathering place much favored in American drama, from “The Petrified Forest” to “Bus Stop.” Here, the scene is Chagrin Falls, Okla., a town where the principal product is death–delivered to convicts in the penitentiary and to the cows in the nearby slaughterhouse.
Into this inbred community, and the bar/motel run by the independent, rough-hewn Irene (Morgan McCabe), comes a bright young alien, Patrice Dougherty (Jennifer Willison), a young Vietnamese-American woman who’s there to report on the coming execution of the rapist/murderer of an 8-year-old girl.
Patrice’s profession offers the opportunity for question-and-answer interviews with the locals on the complexities of capital punishment. But though the issue is aired, there is more to death in Chagrin Falls than the question of the death penalty, and Patrice holds a secret that gives her visit to Chagrin Falls a major, improbable melodramatic twist.
Among the townsfolk who frequent the bar, Riley (Don Tieri), a Vietnam veteran and retired slaughterhouse worker, is haunted by the death of his wife, of the men he had slain in Vietnam and (in one of the play’s most vivid segments) of the cows he had killed. Thaddeus (Harry Eddleman), a seemingly stoic prison guard, is seething with grief and rage over the slow, painful death of his mother. The young Rev. Macomb (Jack Tippet) is finding his religious beliefs sorely tested as he tends one execution after another.
The only person apparently immune from the general state of depression is Henry (Cory Krebsbach), a perpetually cheerful dimwit guard.
Rubbing these various characters together in the close quarters of the bar, McCullough’s script, developed here in a workshopping process at Chicago Dramatists, gives each person a scene of inner revelation; and director Kevin Heckman and a fine cast make the most of those startling moments.
In a uniformly good ensemble, Eddleman’s drawling, laconic and suddenly furious Thaddeus is a standout.
Heckman, with the aid of scenic designer Robert G. Smith, has staged the action so the audience in Stage Left’s 60-seat space sits smack behind the bar, looking into the comings and goings in the rest of the neatly detailed saloon/diner.
This involvement further heightens the immediacy of the action, adding to the dramatic tension so strongly modulated by the actors.
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“Chagrin Falls”
When: Through Nov. 3
Where: Stage Left Theatre, 3408 N. Sheffield Ave.
Phone: 773-883-8830
