Mat Smart recalls putting on plays with his cousin in their grandparents’ basement when he was in third or fourth grade.
Later, he took on roles in theater productions at Waubonsie Valley High School in Aurora, which led to him enrolling at the University of Evansville in Indiana as an acting major in 1997.
Yet despite his interest in theater, becoming a playwright wasn’t in the plans for Smart while growing up in Naperville.
But within a month of arriving at Evansville, he wrote his first play. It was born out of tragedy back home: Three Waubonsie students were killed in a car accident caused by a drunken driver.
“That was the first time people I knew who were my age had died,” said Smart, 31. “I couldn’t make sense of it, so I ended up writing a play. I worked through the event by writing about it.”
Since then, Smart has written a dozen full-length plays. His most recent, “Samuel J. and K.,” a play set in Naperville and Cameroon, has been produced for the Steppenwolf for Young Adults program. It runs through March 13 in the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St., Chicago.
The play centers on two brothers: one who was adopted from Cameroon when he was 3, and the other a Naperville native. Together they journey to Cameroon to explore the adopted brother’s roots. Issues of identity, race and family secrets confront the brothers on their trip.
“It’s really about what is family, where is home, can you feel like you belong somewhere when you’re not from there,” Smart said.
The play was brought to Steppenwolf after debuting at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts last summer. Hallie Gordon, the artistic director of the Steppenwolf for Young Adults program, was told about it by Polly Carl, Steppenwolf’s director of artistic development.
“I just really liked it and thought it would be great for our audience,” Gordon said. “The work I try to present for high school students is how we try to understand differences in each other and how we come to accept them. This play is so much about differences and the unexpected in that.”
Though Smart acknowledges that part of the play’s genesis stems from a trip he took to Cameroon five years ago, the issues explored come from the same place where he grew up. Smart said the brothers, whom he described as “very much suburban Chicago dudes,” have differing views of growing up in Naperville.
Samuel K., the adopted brother, enjoyed living there, while Samuel J. complains about it and says the people living there are shallow.
“That was the same discourse among some of my friends when we were growing up,” Smart said. “Some people love it and some people hate it. But you’ll probably find that anywhere in the world.”
The play also includes a humorous exchange between the brothers poking fun at the underlying attitudes some Naperville residents hold toward neighboring Aurora.
Samuel K. tells his brother, “Stop dumping on Naperville. We’re lucky to be from there. We could be from a lot worse places.”
“What, like Aurora?” Samuel J. says.
“No, like Rwanda.”
For the record, Smart says he enjoyed growing up in Naperville and gets back to visit his mother every month or two from his current home in Minneapolis, where he is a two-time recipient of the Jerome Fellowship from The Playwrights’ Center.
Smart said he appreciated Waubonsie Valley and the support it provided to the arts.
“The arts felt as big a part of the school as sports,” Smart said. “It made me feel like doing theater, or doing art, was important. That shaped a lot of who I am now.”
Smart, who holds a master of fine arts degree in playwriting from the University of California, San Diego, co-founded the Slant Theatre Project in New York City, which he describes as “guerrilla theater.”
“Samuel J. and K.” marks the second production Smart has done in Chicago. In 2006, his rock musical “Keep Ishmael” was produced by White Horse Theatre Company. And his “13th of Paris” opens this month at the Greenhouse Theater Center.
“It’s funny to not have anything in Chicago for four years and in one month I’ll have two plays going on,” Smart said. “That’s what they say, though. You can’t make a living in the theater, but you can make a killing.”
