“That’s the dawn,” gushes one of Stuart Dybek’s dreamy Chicago boys, looking east over the glistening Lake Michigan of the 1950s toward rosy, red beauty and pondering the romance of his city and the promise of his youth. “That,” replies his more accurate friend, “is Gary, Indiana.”
The best urban memoirs capture the paradoxes of a town. Enormously enjoyable in dramatic form, “I Sailed With Magellan” has Chicago down, hot and cold.
As the Chicago characters from Dybek’s 2003 narrative collection rattle around the stage and their town, they find that the shores of Lake Michigan offer comfy havens for fumbling young lovers, but also a landing for corpses. They visit bars with one-armed ‘tenders harassed by two-bit mobsters. They haggle with tree-lot vendors and capture huge rats in a jar. They shiver with cold but can’t stomach the idea of leaving for warmer climes.
And, because Dybek mostly is remembering a 1950s boyhood on the Southwest Side, a blue-collar, old-school father looms large in memory. At one point, this tightly wound, tough-but-lovable dad (richly played by Marc Grapey) encounters a homeless guy near Maxwell Street looking for a quarter. “Have a heart,” says the panhandler. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” pipes up the kid.
Sentimental, memory-driven odes to classic urban taverns, ethnic enclaves, the old Maxwell Street market and the like are hardly unfamiliar. In some ways, “I Sailed With Magellan” recalls such works as “Over the Tavern” or “Brighton Beach Memoires.” Actually, this is the third show about a Chicago boyhood I’ve reviewed within the last 18 months. This spring, Lifeline Theatre produced Adam Langer’s “Crossing California” (streets are frontiers in these pieces). And in 2006, the Walkabout Theater dramatized Dybek’s “The Coast of Chicago.”
But “I Sailed With Magellan” is by far the best. That’s mostly because Victory Gardens artistic director Dennis Zacek had the sense to hire playwright Claudia Allen to do the adaptation. Allen loves sentimental small-town stories and writes accessible comedy. But some of her solo plays have lacked narrative complexity. Here, Dybek’s source material gives Allen both the frame she needs and a touch of the sour to leaven her proclivities for the sweet. In return, Allen reigns in Dybek’s tendency to go off on whimsical tangents, centering her piece on a core family, and rendering the whole thing as clear, unpretentious theater.
Anchored by Grapey doing some of the best work of his career, Sandy Shinner’s production is very pleasurable. And the acting is appropriately colorful, with Lance Baker turning in a rich portrait of a drunken musician gone to permanent seed under the watchful eye of Rob Riley’s decent barkeep.
Not every moment works — Dybek’s story “Orchids” (which also showed up in a musical I reviewed in Cleveland in 1990) doesn’t translate well. And there’s some stuff with the dead that feels mightily contrived. But despite a smaller cast that would be ideal for the material, the piece nonetheless shows us life in this town, as it might be remembered. And with its cinematic and photographic images, Jeff Bauer’s set is most apt.
I’ve probably lived here too long to know for sure if “Magellan” would work in other cities. I suspect it’s mostly of strong and authentic local interest. And at the historic Biograph Theater, local interest surely is the best kind.
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“I Sailed With Magellan”
When: Through July 15
Where: Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Tickets: $20-$45 at 773-871-3000
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cjones5@tribune.com
