Around 10 minutes into the extraordinarily bleak, sparse and devastating little show, “The Shape of the Bones” at Theater Wit, the penny dropped.
I’d first looked down at the cast list of highly accomplished and sought-after Chicago actors — names like Amanda Drinkall, Rae Gray, Gage Wallace and Hilary Williams — for this new play by Spencer Huffman in a tiny black-box studio. Huffman’s company, which has the weirdly generic name of The New Theatre Project, has made a name for itself by creating novel shows inside a working factory on Chicago’s North Side. But it likes to play to small, intimate audiences, so most people have never heard of it. Drinkall et al are more typically seen at the Goodman, or on one of the Chicago TV shows. Why were they all at Theater Wit for a New Theatre Project (seriously?) production in a traditional black-box space where the acting space took up most of the room?
That question was quickly answered.
Not to be missed by this city’s committed storefront fans, “The Shape of the Bones” is filled with the kind of intense scenes that serious Chicago actors live to play. The stakes in director Emily Blanquera’s relentlessly tense production, which do not let up for so much as a millisecond, start out high and range yet higher. Not only will you not be bored for a moment, you may have to remind yourself to breathe.
Here is the premise of the piece, which Huffman first developed in 2023 at the FreeSZFE in Budapest, Hungary, where the show was performed in translation. This is the first U.S. production. Not the last, I hope.
We’re in a small town in the American Southwest somewhere near the Grand Canyon. Some here are under the thrall of a pastor, who has convinced one particular couple, whose relationship already is fraught, that their 12-year-old son (Archer Geye) is capable of assuming a transcendental identity, so to speak. The kid is not the only such person in the community.
Much of the 85-minute play is composed of scenes involving the boy’s infuriated and loving mother (Williams), who is convinced this is all a dangerous delusion, and that this Pastor Riga (Gray) is a craven manipulator who traffics in the promotion of social contagions for her own purposes of retaining power. Meanwhile, the boy’s father, Brendan (Wallace), is all in on the notion, perhaps as a way of atoning for his own past marital sins.
Things go from there, with Drinkall, who is simply astonishing in a couple of short scenes that require her deeply insecure character to have hyperventilating meltdowns, playing another victim of this community’s value system.
The potential metaphoric referents here quickly become clear, and are likely to vary by the viewer.
This is a play about what it’s like to not believe in something that everyone around you believes. It’s a play about the price to be paid when you refuse to be part of a groupthink majority, or when you see harm being enacted upon your child and throw everything you got into an act of protection that actually costs the child’s love of you, their sole protector. Not that they know.
“The Shape of Bones” is not the first play to explore these themes, of course, but I cannot immediately think of one that explores such battles with greater intensity.
Williams is just on fire from the moment she walks out on stage and, frankly, she makes you ache for her character, trapped as she is on a ship of fools. It’s really a cool performance; I kept thinking about how well this actress took a woman who spends the entire play advocating and actually in turn advocates for her character, warts and all. That bespeaks too of very capable direction.
This is no fun night out, as should be evident by now, although I’ve left out some of the other things that disturbed me in a very legitimate theatrical way. “The Shape of the Bones” is an excellent new play (it reminded me in style and minimalist but blasted ferocity of such vaunted writers as David Harrower and the late Sarah Kane).
But, just as importantly, this is also an extraordinarily well-acted production, very much in the classic, high-stakes Chicago tradition. Everyone here knew why we’d all shown up to the theater together: to interrogate truth and expose the phonies, to try and decide what must be protected and what must be protested.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “The Shape of the Bones” (4 stars)
When: Through March 22
Where: The New Theatre Project at Theater Wit, 1229 W Belmont Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes
Tickets: $25-$32 at 773-975-8150 and thenewtheatreproject.com
