Displaying items by tag: Gift Theatre

There are funerals where grief brings a family together, and then there are funerals where grief opens the door to everything a family has spent years trying to keep buried. In Hayward, playwright Netta Walker turns a father’s funeral into a reckoning with family secrets, unresolved pain, and the ghosts that refuse to stay in the past.

Given a bold world-premiere production by The Gift Theatre, presented at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater, Hayward, directed by AmBer Montgomery, reimagines elements of Hamlet and Electra through the eyes of Luna, the youngest daughter in a deeply complicated family. On the day of her father’s funeral, Luna announces that his ghost has come to visit her. What follows is part family drama, part dark comedy, and part haunting exploration of the emotional inheritance passed from one generation to the next.

The play opens with a funeral, and from the moment the family enters, it is clear that this will be no ordinary farewell.

Luna (Ireon Roach), her father’s favorite child, is overwhelmed by grief as she stands at the podium to deliver his eulogy. Her siblings seem considerably less interested in mourning. Eric (Victor Musoni), dressed in a white memorial T-shirt and sagging pants, and Leila (Sydney Charles), wearing a white dress that seems decidedly inappropriate for the occasion, give the impression they would rather be anywhere else. Their oldest brother, AJ (Gregory Fenner), a military man, stands rigidly at attention, as though guarding the proceedings at a state funeral.

Seated apart from the chaos is Maria (Shanesia Davis), the family matriarch, dressed in white, her face veiled and a white handkerchief close at hand. She carries herself with the solemnity of a woman accustomed to holding a family together, even when its members threaten to tear one another apart.

(from left) Alfred Wilson, Gregory Fenner, Shanesia Davis and Ireon Roach in The Gift Theatre's presentation of Hayward at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater. Photo by Joe Mazza / Brave Lux.

During the service, Luna sees her deceased father, Tony (Watson Swift). Her vision is quickly dismissed, but the encounter signals that something deeper is happening within this family. At the gravesite, the arrival of Uncle Johnson (Alfred Wilson), who is also a pastor, adds another layer of tension. There is little pastoral comfort in Johnson’s approach. He berates the family, directing particular hostility toward Luna because of who she is.

Religion, family expectations, and personal identity collide, and the resulting arguments reveal a household where love and resentment have become inseparable. The siblings fight, challenge one another, and expose old wounds, yet beneath their dysfunction is a recognizable bond. They may not know how to care for one another gracefully, but the connection remains.

At the center is Luna, whose grief is both the most visible and the most unsettling. Her father’s visits are not simply a supernatural manifestation of mourning; he has a request for her that reaches beyond the grave. As the family’s history unfolds, we learn that Tony served in the military during the Gulf War and returned carrying psychological wounds. The play suggests that the trauma he experienced did not end with him. His children, particularly Luna, may have inherited some of the emotional consequences without fully understanding their origins.

Walker’s most compelling achievement is her creation of characters who feel genuinely complicated. These are not tidy theatrical portraits of a dysfunctional family. They are people whose behavior can be outrageous, infuriating, and unexpectedly tender, sometimes within the same scene. The comedy emerges naturally from their interactions, offering relief without entirely diminishing the pain beneath the laughter.

Montgomery has assembled a strong ensemble and directs the actors with a clear sense of purpose. One of the production’s funniest moments comes when Maria sits center stage and her children gradually gather around her, one by one, as if seeking the comfort of the family’s center. When the last child arrives, Maria simply gets up and leaves them together. The gesture is hilarious, revealing, and familiar to anyone who has watched a family matriarch reach the limits of her patience. It is a moment best experienced rather than explained.

The scenic design is another notable achievement. The stage transforms from a church to a gravesite and eventually into the family’s living room. The final home setting is impressively detailed, providing a convincing domestic space in which the family’s conflicts can continue to unfold. My reservation is the time required to complete the transformation. Although the finished environment is effective, the process of getting there interrupts the production’s momentum.

Ultimately, Hayward is an entertaining and ambitious work that uses humor, supernatural elements, and family conflict to examine the lasting effects of trauma. Walker’s play is interested in the emotional territory families occupy: the memories they avoid, the wounds they pass along, and the love that survives even when they struggle to express it.

Still, the play would benefit from sharpening its central argument about mental health. Tony’s military service and the suggestion of inherited trauma offer fertile ground, but the relationship between psychological injury, family behavior, and Luna’s experiences could be developed with greater clarity. The subject deserves more than implication, particularly when the play so effectively demonstrates how one person’s unresolved pain can shape an entire household.

With its memorable characters, dark humor, and committed performances, Hayward offers a lively and often moving portrait of a family trying to find its way through grief. Like a Floridian-style shiva, the gathering is noisy, irreverent, and emotionally unpredictable. The dead may have been laid to rest, but in this family, the past is very much alive.

RECOMMENDED

When: Through Nov. 15

Where: Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theatre 1700 N. Halsted St. Chicago

Tickets: $45 - $50

Steppenwolf.org/hayward

Kids these days…

I went into opening night of Gift Theatre’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman only knowing that my 16-year-old daughter was excited to be my date. “It’s dark, Dad,” she warned me. Boy, was she right. “But it’s amazing, Dad,” she also assured me. And boy, was she even righter on that count.

So, dark and amazing. The Pillowman is both of these. But what is it?

A buddy cop piece. A murder mystery. The touching tale of two brothers, each all the other has in the world. A warning from some dystopian dictatorship. A volume of grim, gruesome fairy tales. The Pillowman is all of these things, and more. Much more.

I haven’t enjoyed a play this much since Goodman’s Jeff-winning 2018 production of The Wolves. And that’s because — along with McDonagh’s masterful book, Laura Alcala Baker’s visionary direction, and Lauren Nichols and Courtney Winkelman’s dark, stark scenery, of course — the four actors who tell The Pillowman’s story (and its stories within the story) give what’s a pretty soulless premise a whole lot of soul. The four-person cast is The Pillowman’s beating, battered, bleeding, bloody heart.

A word of warning. This play is dark. And shocking. And violent. It’s about child murders. And even worse, childhood trauma. But even more shocking is, coming from the mouths of a couple of the characters, a word I’d figured was too taboo to have to hear in today’s world. The R Word. Of course, its use speaks volumes about the characters who use it. Even as it’s used to describe Jay Worthington’s Michal, a developmentally disabled fellow. Worthington, to his credit, plays Michal with incredible restraint and empathy, never using the character’s condition and lot in life for laughs. Whether climbing the walls or crawling the floor, whether admitting to the unthinkable or revealing unthinkable trauma, Worthington’s Michal draws the eye whenever he’s onstage — an incredible character, but just as incredible a performance.

Michal’s brother Katurian, the play’s main character, is a storyteller and tells this story to us, the audience. Tucked away in some future police interrogation room for the duration of the play, Katurian begins the show with a bag over his head, as in the dark as his audience — us — is. Martel Mannin’s face and expressions do the same heavy lifting that Michal’s physicality do, manufacturing suspense, shock, and sorrow — a lifetime of sorrow. And, along with inventive ways of illustrating Katurian’s twisted children’s tales, Mannin’s face and voice keep the audience enraptured as he tells one story after another, each designed again to suspend belief, to shock sensibilities, and to create a world of sorrow.

In Katurian’s world, his cement holding cell, we also meet the two cops investigating a series of incidents seemingly copied straight from the pages of the fictional storyteller’s fictional stories. Gregory Fenner’s Ariel comes off at first as the prototype “bad cop” (I think one of the two even identifies him as such), threatening (and carrying out) acts of brutality, puffing on a vape, and stalking the concrete cube that is the play’s entire world. But look closer and it’s Fenner’s eyes that tell deeper stories that come to the fore as the play progresses. In Ariel’s eyes, ferocity morphs into fear.

But in a cast where each member could lay claim to being the MVP, my award goes to Cyd Blakewell. Her role, Detective Tupolski — it seems both from the play’s unchanged dialogue and a bit of internet perusing I did after the house lights came on — was written for a man. (Jeff Goldblum played the role in New York.) This is a physical (and violent) play, and Blakewell’s easy and subtle physicality looms throughout, even as others are applying electrodes and murdering children and climbing and crawling and crying and creating dark imaginary worlds, as she just pretends at being the “good cop.” (Full disclosure: when Blakewell first started her bit, my daughter turned to me and said, “It’s mom!” at the same time I turned to her and said “It’s your mom!” so maybe her performance hit close to home.) And it’s the story that Blakewell’s Tupolski tells near the end, using just a blackboard and a piece of white chalk, that was for me the best scene in a play full of contenders.

So if you’re up for a very dark evening of entertainment, you’ll be entertained. And if you can get past some pretty unsettling content in order to admire acting and storytelling at its finest, The Gift Theatre’s The Pillowman is for you, now through March 29.

As soon as I saw the warm, rich lighting of a luxurious futuristic bedroom on the Space Ship Destiny lit and decorated by designers Heather Gilbert and Christopher Kriz and the set design by Arnel Sancianco, where the entire action of the play takes place, I thought this is going to be an interesting show. To the right of the set was a spaceship departure board with the names and photos of the passengers, along with their assigned room number, as they were headed to a planet three months away from Earth. The other ships had names like Fortune, Kismet, Prospect and Horizon suggesting that the people leaving earth are doing so willingly and must have enough money to do so. Smooch Medina’s spaceship flight calendar and wall projection also counts down the number of days the passengers have spent locked on this room together, which is a great tension builder as well. 

There are just three characters in the play. One a soldier who is suffering from PTSD from a previous mission in which he witnessed the killing of civilians that haunts him still in a variety of deep emotional ways. He has requested a private room because he cannot sleep well while struggling with his inner demons but somehow an attractive young woman passenger has been placed in the room with him, much to his disapproval. Ed Flynn portrays this sensitive, journal-writing soldier (previously referred to as “Grant”) who is also prone to violent mood changes and outbursts with great feeling and a sweaty intensity that is frightening at times. 

When you consider that he is locked into this “hotel room" for three full months due to a quarantine placed on certain sick members aboard the ship with a petite young female to whom he objects, it’s not difficult to imagine the strain that gradually surmounts. Janelle Villas does a wonderful job of showing the audience her fresh-faced bubbly enthusiasm while hiding a dark past that includes at least one rape, which has also left her in a state of PTSD. 

Co-directed by artistic director Michael Patrick Thornton and guest artist Jessica Thebus, the “Pilgrims” moves along quickly yet with subtle changes in the characters that seem very satisfying and real with a lot of emotional suspense and tension. We the audience wonder if these two characters will ever bond, or even reach their destination safely. We also ponder what will become of their edgy, ever-changing relationship once they are finally released from this artificial and close-quartered isolation into the general population of the new planet.  

The third character is a robot named Jasmine played with a great sense of humor and also an eerie, smiling menace by Brittany Burch. Jasmine has been programmed not only to answer all their questions and provide all their meals and cleaning services. She is also one of the older forms of “human-like robots” known for their ability to satisfy without any compunction - either member, male or female, with oral sex or intercourse if the human need arises.

The universality of two people meeting for the first time, learning about each other's baggage and foibles and being forced to overcome them in order to at least be friends if not lovers cannot be denied. This is a love story set in outer space plain and simple, even though it is suggested in the play that couples may have been placed together purposely to repopulate the new planet. 

I highly recommend this production for its unique retelling of a tale as old as time, when Fate meets Destiny and two very "human" human beings struggle to please each other while being true to their own individual dreams of the future but must in the end reveal the dark, undesirable places of their souls in order to overcome them and move into a deeper union free of mistakes or tragedies of the past.

Excellent performances and an imaginative script make Pilgrims a compelling and often humorous sci-fi love story that resonates. Pilgrims is being performed at Gift Theatre through July 30th. For more show information or to purchase tickets visit www.thegifttheatre.org.