‘Monster’ the story of a teen filmmaker caught up in a crime

Before he died in 2014, the fine young-adult novelist Walter Dean Myers wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times; the essay was a reaction to a University of Wisconsin study that found that of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, only 93 were about black people.

After articulating the depth of the impact on his younger self, Myers wrote: “Today I am a writer, but I also see myself as something of a landscape artist. I paint pictures of scenes for inner-city youth that are familiar, and I people the scenes with brothers and aunts and friends they all have met.”

“Monster,” a justly beloved 1999 courtroom novel about an empathetic, middle-class African-American kid who becomes ensnared in a robbery that results in a murder, is one of Myers’ paintings with words.

The story of 16-year-old Steve Harmon — labeled a monster at trial but actually a complicated young man — “Monster” is the latest show to be part of the Steppenwolf for Young Adults program. As adapted by Aaron Carter and directed by Hallie Gordon, it’s an interesting and intermittently potent show, but, alas, this live telling of Myers’ story struggles to deal with the novel’s narrative complexity in a way that translates to the stage and serves the work.

It’s tough. The novel is structured like a screenplay, as interspersed with “handwritten” entries from the leading character’s diary. The reason for the experimental form is that Myers was fundamentally interested in the perception gap: how this kid would make his own movie of his out-of-body experience in the criminal justice system and how that clashes with the system’s perception of him. The work isn’t intended as a straightforward apologia for Steve (played by Daniel Kyri), but it does invite the reader to consider reductive terms like “monster” when, in fact, the situation is considerably more complex.

This is not an easy book to adapt as a play, and Carter has ended up with a lot of linkage involving Steve saying “cut” or “fade to” or “close-up on,” which works fine on the page but jars when you’re watching a dramatization. It feels weird for the act of dramatization to be unacknowledged when Steve is so sophisticated when it comes to how stories are told. Why doesn’t he know he’s also the narrator in a play?

Filmmaking is one of Steve’s main interests (and maybe his salvation) so it probably would have done too much violence to the book to have him just be writing a play instead. But it doesn’t work so well to read out so much of the screenplay boilerplate — it gets repetitive and, frankly, it also gets in the way of what matters most, which is what is going on inside the leading character’s head as he tries to deal with his life imploding after what feels like a mistake most any of us could make, given Steve’s circumstances.

Kyri, a talented young actor, does show us some of that. And several of the actors (who play multiple roles) offer rich performances as people caught in the dehumanizing spiral of a system that operates only in binary terms. Namir Smallwood brings emotional complexity and Alana Arenas and Kenn E. Head, who play Steve’s very functional parents, are moving. You get the sense of how chaos can befall us all; you think back to your own mistakes.

But the emotional tension of the show never rises as fully as it might; the show keeps running away from itself. The balance between the act of storytelling and the story told is a tad out of whack; what we want most is to better understand this complex young man.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib

Review: ‘Monster’ by Steppenwolf for Young Adults (2.5 stars)

When: Through March 9 (public performances on weekends)

Where: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Tickets: $20 ($15 students) at 312-335-1650 or steppenwolf.org