“Tad in 5th City”
✭✭✭
I don’t know that Carla Stillwell’s new play for MPAACT treads new ground thematically, but it is good company all the same and has a stylistic personality all its own.
Stillwell has adapted her script from the works of local spoken word artist Orron Kenyatta, whose witty observations about African-American life on Chicago’s West Side in 1978 are brought to life by a cast willing to dig in beyond their character archetypes.
Ten-year-old Tad (Destin Teamer) is the story’s focus, a bright, sweet kid who is much too young to worry about what, exactly, that pretty lady in the short skirt and fishnets really does to earn a few bucks.
It’s a one-step-forward, two-steps-back kind of existence, where “self-medicinal practices are necessary to quiet the things that go bump in the night and go creepy crawl in your bed and through your head. Who be God when your mind turns on you because life happened to you because of a madman’s choices?” That’s terrific writing, although Stillwell (who also directs) hasn’t yet figured out how to incorporate the more naturalistic moments of dialogue with Kenyatta’s rhythmic poetry.
The staging is also a bit cramped — visually, Stillwell has a ways to go as a director — but she does know how to bring out the best in her actors; the play is filled with complex portrayals. And she has the right kind of instincts when it comes to having some fun within this desolate narrative landscape. There is no missing the towering, blond Afro wig that costume designer Sharlet Webb has plopped on the head of Shayla A. Jarvis’ streetwalker, for a look worthy of Marie Antoinette or Lady Gaga.
As Tad’s mother, Sidney Miller is far more than just the harried working matriarch who drowns her sorrows the moment she walks in the door. She is a woman who makes just as many good decisions as bad; she is unrelenting, but she has a right to be.
In some smaller roles, Sati Word is a scene-stealer, whether he’s playing a loose-limbed drug dealer or a self-righteous clergyman who isn’t interested in helping the neighborhood so much as preaching at its inhabitants.
Through June 13 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. Tickets are $21-$23 at 773-404-7336 or mpaact.org
“People We Know” ✭✭1/2
What goes on between two people behind closed doors? I suspect playwright Robert Tenges has it right — we can’t really guess at just how boring someone else’s marriage may be. Also, how disturbing.
Amid tense small talk of Montessori schools and fertility tests, the couples here sit and gape and judge one another over glasses of wine — only to go home to their own twisted arrangements that skirt the line of morality. (Adam Webster’s staging is a little bedraggled and awkward at times — the Side Project may be a tight space, but I’ve seen it used to better effect.)
Tenges is working in a vein similar to Neil LaBute’s 1998 film “Your Friends and Neighbors,” peopled with loathsome or passive characters who can’t seem to do right by one another. That’s marriage, seems to be the message, and maybe that’s so: “I only seem bad because you know everything,” a husband says to his wife, and you think: Well yes, that kind of makes sense.
Through June 6 at The Side Project, 1439 W. Jarvis Ave. Tickets are $18 at 800-838-3006 or thesideproject.net
