He longs for the past.
He misses the time when Coltrane, Miles and Bird were all doing their thing on the saxophone and trumpet.
He misses that era when Beat Generation novelists such as Jack Kerouac released books such as “On the Road,” an autobiographical, stream-of-consciousness piece about traveling through mid-century America.
In essence, he just misses the creative exuberance that seems to have existed only decades ago.
Thing is, at 24 years old, playwright Brian Tucker never lived through any of those times.
“In a very generic sense, I just have this romantic need for these things I can’t touch. Like I grew up in the second wave of hip-hop, but with the deaths of people like Tupac and Biggie. So when they died, who filled that void?” he asks flatly, sitting in the corner of a Hyde Park coffee shop. “Hip-hop is supposed to be what jazz and rock ‘n’ roll was. But — ” he trails off. “So what do you do? You go back. That’s what I do with music. The same holds true with literature for me.”
His work as a playwright is a response to that. The past is what gives juice to his present; it’s what inspires him to create the kind of bluesy and melancholy stage productions in which his protagonists long for something in much the same way.
The South Side native is an emerging star, telling stage stories from his post-MTV generation point of view.
One among six
His work will be presented alongside that of five other playwrights — two other local talents and three nationally known writers — at this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival. The playwrights were all charged with crafting one-act plays centered around the change in climate, playing off the event’s larger theme of global warming.The local playwrights’ involvement is partly based on an effort by festival organizers to bring in a younger and more diverse audience. Organizers want the festival, which is in its 18th year and traditionally attracts an older, middle- to upper-middle class audience, to appeal to people of varying economic and cultural backgrounds.
“We love our current audience, our previous audience. But I’m convinced that we’re doing something that would interest and engage younger people as well,” says Lawrence Weschler, the festival’s artistic director. “This particular topic of global warming … it’s the young people who will live to see what will happen. And poor people, it seems, will be the levees that rich people will use to protect themselves. … So this topic in particular is urgent.”
To help drive that point home, the festival turned to local theater companies and invited Lisa Dillman, Tanya Saracho and Tucker. Nationally known playwrights Don DeLillo, Sara Ruhl and Jose Rivera also wrote one-acts that will be presented at the festival.
Tucker’s one-act play, “Detroit ’99,” is set in that place in 1999. He created an Al Gore-like politician whose platform is global warming, an issue that constituents have yet to pick up on.
Location is everything
“He wants to give this really provocative speech in Detroit, and his handlers have to talk him down from it,” Tucker says. “They tell him you don’t come into Detroit and give a speech on climate change. It’s the one place you don’t do it. And he says it’s the one place you have to do it. The story hinges on that argument.”
Derrick Sanders, the founding artistic director of the Congo Square Theatre in Chicago, handpicked Tucker for this challenge. He wanted to bring him into the Chicago forefront, and he knew Tucker would deliver something fresh and innovative.
“He’s not only challenging himself as a playwright, but he’s also challenging perceptions of people and what they think of blacks and middle class or whatever subject he’s taking on,” Sanders says. “He’s challenging all the images, and I think that’s the next wave of writer that’s really going to get noticed. “He’s really taken his work to another level. He has strong integrity, and that’s what I really enjoy about his work.”
Growing up, Tucker bounced around the South Side — including such neighborhoods as Pullman, Hyde Park and Grand Crossing — and the south suburbs.
He would leave Thornwood High School in South Holland, get into his sky blue 1989 Honda Accord and drive around with an extra-large cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, listening to James Taylor’s greatest hits.
“I would do these circle tours of the city. I would take Halsted all the way up to the North Side and then go west from there, usually down Irving Park or something like that,” he says. After stints at the University of Illinois and the New School in New York, he transferred to the Juilliard School Playwrights Program, and he was one of the youngest graduates of the program. While in New York, he wrote “Bathing Van Gogh,” “The Great Defeat of Coltrane Grey” and “The St. James Infirmary.”He headed for Los Angeles earlier this year — it was a chance, the young playwright says, to see if he could convert what he does onstage to television or even film.
He left after three months and headed to the South, burned out by the L.A. experience. He rented a little cottage about an hour north of New Orleans.
“I spent the years bouncing between New York, Chicago and L.A. and couldn’t really stomach the idea of going back to one of those places, so I got a cabin where I would be alone. But I could be close to a city if I needed to find a cafe every once in a while,” he says.
He holed up in his cottage with bottles of Scotch and his laptop, hoping creativity would strike.
He came back to Chicago this summer.Tucker isn’t so sure where he’s heading next. He now knows that being a playwright doesn’t mean that he has to leave Chicago again.
Another Woody Allen?
“I had this grand notion that I wanted to be the Woody Allen of Chicago,” he says. “That’s still not a bad idea. I would love to be able to paint my city in my work, but I want to do it in a natural way. I don’t want to force it, much in the same way that August Wilson put Pittsburgh in his work.”
Up next is a possible update of Langston Hughes’ “Black Nativity” at Congo Square Theatre. Details are still being worked out to see if it can be done for the holiday season. If so, they will go into rehearsals in the next few weeks.
Still, he can only see as far as the end of the Chicago Humanities Festival.
“I don’t know where I’ll be after this,” he says, taking a sip from his whole milk chai latte. “I may rent another cabin somewhere.”
With more bottles of Scotch?
“No,” he says, “with less. Much less.”
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Brian Tucker
Age: 24
Residence: Chicago
Awards and honors: The Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Fellow; the Herrick Theatre Foundation Award for Playwrights; two LeCompte du Nouy Prizes
Chicago Humanities Festival one-act play: “Detroit ’99”
Tucker will give a reading of his play 7:30-9:30 p.m. Oct. 29 at Little Black Pearl Art and Design Center
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klcarter@tribune.com
