After taking up temporary quarters in nearly two dozen different performance spaces, the 15-year-old Lookingglass Theatre Company — an adolescent swimming into institutional adulthood — has toweled off at its own, fascinatingly refurbished home: The Water Tower Water Works across the street from the famous Michigan Avenue Water Tower.
Lookingglass made its name on, among other projects, “Metamorphoses,” Mary Zimmerman’s limpid retelling of Ovid’s transformational myths, set in and around a large pool. Now, Lookingglass is a water-based theater for the ages. It’s lovely when metaphors work out in practical terms, and this one has. The $8 million theater that has burrowed into the industrial guts of this working pumping station — yes, the pumps housed in this 1866 landmark still handle up to 250 million gallons a day — can take its place proudly among Chicago’s many diverse performance venues.
The inaugural production at 821 N. Michigan is “Race,” director and co-adapter David Schwimmer’s stage treatment of a 1992 oral history by another Chicago landmark for the ages, Studs Terkel.
How is the show? Pretty good, and then in much of Act 2, better than that. How is the new theater? It always takes a few shows for a space to reveal its secrets, drawbacks, hidden potential and true character. But I liked very much what I saw on the first date. And once you’re in the Water Works door, getting to your seat is half the fun.
Finding that door is the trick. Say you’re walking north on Michigan Avenue. There’s the water tower on your left, the hardy 1871 Great Fire survivor. Its architectural bookend, the pumping station, is straight ahead, on the lakeside side of the street.
The sign outside the pumping station — rechristened the Water Works building — lists what’s to be found inside. First: A City of Chicago store. Second: Lookingglass Theatre. Third: Chicago Flat Sammies, along with the Hot Tix half-price ticket booth and other attractions.
The building’s sole entrance lies to the north. Owing to city landmark signage restrictions, the modest dual vertical marquees announcing, quietly, the presence of Lookingglass (nearer Michigan Avenue) and the current offering, “Race” (toward the lake), are a mere eight feet tall. Few pedestrians strolling by on the way to the John Hancock Center, for example, would realize there’s a play going on in that pumping station.
You walk inside, and immediately you hear a whirrwhirrwhirrhummmhummming noise. Behind a thick, clear wall of glass, the functional H20 pumps do their thing. It’s a great sight and a great sound, historic and immense and unexpected. Along an east wall, a box office and a first-floor lobby beckons.
Above the bar in the modestly scaled lobby, theater-goers are visually reminded of where they are by a photographic triptych featuring the 19 Lookingglass ensemble members (Schwimmer included), photographed underwater individually, in the Northwestern University pool, and gathered together for one big image created by Philip R. Smith and gripdesignc.
The primary playing space itself, located in a former boiler room, seats about 220, depending on the production. The niftiest feature of the theater can’t be shown off until Lookingglass is a few shows into its life here. It is the balcony, a “demountable” adjustable model in theater-architecturespeak. All four sides can be used, as they are for “Race.” Or fewer, or none.
Schwimmer’s 12-actor staging is a straightforward, plain-spoken adaptation, in which dozens of Chicago residents and Americans living elsewhere open their hearts and mouths on the subject of what Terkel called “the American obsession.”
Cheryl Lynn Bruce is the first to speak. She plays Mamie Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, whose vicious 1955 murder in Mississippi — and subsequent open-casket funeral, revealing the state of Till’s water-logged, ravaged body — helped bring on the civil rights movement. Mobley’s story is interrupted by a choral litany of prejudice, voiced by various members of the cast: “I know they went through slavery and all that, but I don’t think we should have to pay,” says one white male character. Another, from an African-American woman: “When I see a black guy walking with a white girl, I think, “Brother, what? What, brother, what? And my first husband was white.”
In the play co-written by Joy Gregory and Schwimmer (the latter best known for a wee television show called “Friends”), performers often speak as themselves, relaying painful, awkward or oddball memories of racism experienced or expressed. The tone of the piece veers from straight-up civics-lesson earnestness to outsize caricature. These are its conventional extremes; the best of the show, both as written and acted, works a more fertile middle ground, where the voices surprise us.
Here’s an example of what works less well in “Race.” In Act 1, a protracted comic vignette titled “Name That Stereotype” flops around for what seems like an hour, trading in tired racial images and trash-talk. In Act 2, the show offers a lovely improvement on the same idea. Actor Joe Sikora plays a Wilmette kid, white as the lake is wet, whose immersion in black rap culture is fulsome enough to include phrases like “peace out!” Then comes DeAnna N. J. Brooks, who says simply: “I got something to say to you.” She proceeds with a wonderful, angry, hilarious monologue about white boys who act white, white boys who don’t, the whole screed ending with her planting a smooch on Sikora’s lips. This says everything the game-show spoof wants to, but can’t.
In Act 2 especially, the best actors get the chance to stretch out, explore some subtleties and, in effect, air out the show’s more stilted passages. Tony Fitzpatrick does first-rate work as a former Ku Klux Klansman and, at one point, as himself. “When people ask,” he says, “I tell them I’m a Chicagoan — and we’re not a race, we’re a species,” he says, bringing down the house.
At 2 1/2 hours, the mosaiclike “Race” lurches a bit from story to story, reminiscence to reminiscence. The transitions and rhythms could use more snap. Solid and workmanlike, with scenic designer Daniel Ostling’s barnlike set housing the stage floor, the show feels more like a project delivered than a production inspired. But as the evening progresses we hear a more truthful variety of voices, we get better acting all around, and experience a more telling blend of dramatic and comic concerns.
“Race” is an inspired production from one angle, certifiably. The new Lookingglass Theatre may not have a lot of wiggle room in the Water Works building. But it uses what it has in an inspiring way.
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“Race”
When: Through Aug. 10
Where: Lookingglass Theatre Company, Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave.
Phone: 773-477-8088
