Art is often impersonal, slickly broadcast over cable wires, awash in lavish production values or entombed in giant arenas.
And then there’s that rare magic on view Monday in the terrific opening of the sixth season of Steppenwolf Theatre’s inimitable Traffic series. The stars were musician Steve Earle, the Tennessee balladeer gifted with pleasing melodies and an unforgiving intelligence, and Chicago poet-artist Tony Fitzpatrick, bard of the baseball mound and a kind of surreal doodler with his paintbrush. Ostensibly, the idea was to link urban grit and rockabilly poetry, joining two different kinds of wordsmiths.
But the program, titled “The Remembered City,” was a great deal more. Earle and Fitzpatrick have been friends for years and their matchup was all about what they share as much as what they create. Make no mistake. These are a couple of burly, hard-living, larger-than-life characters. There’s nothing touchy-feely about either of them: Suggest it in person, and you’re unlikely to escape the barroom unwounded.
But the communion of their rough-and-tumble, unsentimental work onstage Monday reverberated with feeling. Just as they both champion the likes of the addict and the tarnished hero, they do so with a passion all the more powerful because it’s understated.
They met in the late ’80s, when Earle played here and, thanks to the $1 ticket, performed for the first time before a seething crowd. Warmed by the acclaim, he met outside with a bunch of fans and adjourned to a Mexican restaurant for a dinner with complete strangers. One of them was Fitzpatrick.
“Every time I come to town he thinks he has to feed me,” Earle explained. “I tell him I don’t need three pounds of raw meat before I sing, but he does it every time anyway.”
That introduction led not to a long narrative of their lives but a demonstration through their work of why they get along so well. Earle sings or recites about the tragedies of heroin addiction with the same honesty Fitzpatrick applies to the salute to his father in “Bum Town.”
Just as Earle evokes the dark alleys and loneliness of crack-smoking in Nashville, Fitzpatrick tells of the lost world of his father’s Irish South Side, of Western and Stony Island Avenues, of a dead uncle and a Catholic imagery that haunts him to this day. In a presentation simply but effectively staged by Betsy Ingram, they spoke and sang, sometimes together.
For a finish, they enacted a miniature poetry slam, ending with Fitzpatrick’s putdown of boyhood hunting and Earle’s admission that one picture Fitzpatrick sent him depicted, by extrasensory guesswork, the first animal Earle himself killed.
