Displaying items by tag: Eddie Torres

Matthew Paul Olmos is a playwright on the rise, and under the direction of Laura Alcalá Baker we have a chance to see a beautiful production of an exceptional work in its world premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. As the vernacular title suggests, “A Home What Howls (or the house what was ravine)” is not a staid work, not a constrained “Cherry Orchard” where emotions are buried between the lines.

Instead, Olmos’ work is poetic, magical, and musical as well, and the characters, though poor, are living rich, happy lives in their homes. In the first act, realism rules in many scenes, and Olmos shows a mastery of dialog and detail.

The play opens with a married couple—Abrana (Charin Alvarez) and Manuel Vargas (Eddie Torres) asleep on a bed. In the adjacent room their daughter Soledad (Leslie Sophia Pérez) is hard at work on papers scattered around the floor, perhaps her schoolwork, or maybe something else.

Her parents are awakened by sounds of trickling water running outside. Soon after, sound of a helicopter roars by, and we hear earth moving equipment as well. “There are nightmares around this house,” says Manuel as he and Abrana jump from the bed, and he begins fiddling with a trap door in the floor—an escape hatch?

We begin to piece together that this family is illegally living in a home condemned to make way for a reservoir, one that will allow housing and other development nearby ravine , through which a river flows. By means of a kind of inferential exposition, Olmos paints a portrait of what happens when families are driven from their homes by development—not from the outside looking in, but from inside the homes and families.

Olmos departs from this style to solid realism filled with exposition in one crucial scene: a public hearing at which the now adult Soledad challenges government official Frank over the process by which these families in the way of development have been displaced. It is certainly the best representation I’ve run across of a marginalized community challenging the validity of an eminent domain claim by city officials to displace homeowners dwelling in an area coveted by developers.

As the ravine along which they live is being flooded, and their homes taken, Soledad challenges the city establishment at a public hearing, outing all the tropes which society accepts as the rules of the game—the original seizure of the land from indigenous people by treaty and ceremony; the surveys of businesses showing broad support for the development; Tim Hopper in the role of Frank is exquisitely obtuse. After all, he argues, a ceremony was held in which a “citizen” of the indigenous “transferred” rights to development to the city. “How was this representative procured?” Soledad asks.

The question flies over his head, as Frank goes on to describe, in all sincerity, a ceremony that he found moving—but it highlights the suggestion that the indigenous individual may have had no right to speak for his people. “You’re using the term ‘peace offering,’” Soledad says. “But Public Works uses the terms ‘relinquish’ and ‘transfer.’”

And what about the original homeowners who settled for generations in this indigenous land. ”They were not asked, but they were considered deeply,” Frank says. ”Only businesses” were surveyed, admits Frank, who is beginning to realize he has aquite an adversary in Soledad. Frank says the homeowners displaced were compensated for the value of their homes, which were dilapidated and brought them little. But a home is much more than a building, Soledad points out. How were they compensated for the loss of happiness and memories, and the dispersion of their families, she asks. Market value can’t equal that kind of loss.

“A Home What Howls” runs about 90 minutes, no intermission, and is part of Steppenwolf's Young Adults theater program. But as with other such works in the Young Adults series, it is profoundly good, so I try to see them all.

I will say that I couldn’t always follow the magical parts of the second half, as the old woman resident Syera Lama (Isabel Quintero) appears. She teams up with Soledad in a quest for the rights of the people, encountering a menacing train conductor, also played by Hopper. Quintera also appears numerous times disguised as a magical figure Coyote. Despite my own confusion, the audience was clearly digging it, and the laughter at comical scenes was quite full. “A Home What Howls" runs through March 2 in Steppenwolf’s new in-the-round Ensemble Theater. It’s a great chance to see the work of a playwright we will doubtless be hearing from more and more.

“Downstate” is a bit of a dog whistle for Chicagoland, suggesting a cultural distinction between urbanites in the north, and the vast agrarian expanses to the south – downstate - where trash goes, sewage flows, and where the state government builds prisons.

The word becomes generalized in Downstate, a new play by Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Norris, which looks at the fraught issue of finding housing for convicted pedophiles after they serve time for their crimes. During parole, these men are returned to the” community,” but not to their home.

Instead they live in halfway houses operated by non-profits, sited in carefully proscribed areas that must be so-many hundreds of feet away from schools and other areas children may gather. The inhabitants are not allowed to go online, or possess a smartphone, keep alcohol, use Facebook, or move about freely.

Norris takes the less politically correct position of empathy in showing the suffering imposed on these pariahs, who in the world of #MeToo are unlikely to get a second thought. They are subject to regular inquisitions by parole officers, and a concatenation of rules and restrictions means there are few locations for them to live in such transitional halfway houses. So, they are shipped Downstate.

“I started doing a lot of reading about the things paroled sex offenders increasingly face– registries, residency restrictions, neighborhood watches, self-appointed vigilante groups,” says Norris. “These are post-incarceration punishments, that don’t exist for any other category of criminal.”

That in a nutshell is what Downstate is about: four men holed up in a house run by a Lutheran social service agency. They can go to work and come home, and that’s about it – even the local IGA grocery store is only 2,450 feet from the elementary school. They are indeed strange bedfellows, and Norris gives us the nuance of the caliber of their individual violations:

• the piano teacher Fred (Steppenwolf stalwart Francis Guinan) who had sex with two adolescent male students. Guinan, in an understated performance, shows the range that can be expressed within a very constrained character.

• Gio (Glenn Davis in an amazing, hyperbolic performance) a frenetic man on the make with a plan in his hand, whose crime was considered Category 1 (lower level) statutory rape of a young woman below age.

• Felix (Eddie Torres) who was convicted of incest with his daughter. Torres conveys the abject suffering and torment as he loses access to his family.

• A Broadway choreographer and accomplished promoter and musical artist, Dee, who fell in love with a 14-year-old boy in a road show of Peter Pan.

As Dee, K. Todd Freeman gives what will certainly become a definitive expression to the role. He is the settled voice of reason and a nurturant center of gravity within this ad hoc family of men, shopping for them and helping to make a home for them. As audience, we listen to Dee: he dishes and gives back as good as he gets – and he becomes our guide and the closest thing to a voice of reason.

Norris may be toying with us, then, by making Dee a very sympathetic character, while at the same time making him an unrepentant advocate for man-boy love – the movement that sees adult male love of minor boys as a victimless crime, and which advocates for release of those convicted of it. 

“There’s not many cases of death by blowjob!” Dee asserts. Gio, for one, abhors Dee both for his gayness and for his pederasty, with some violent outbursts in the house as a result.

Norris focuses this tension with the introduction of Andy (Tim Hopper), a Northshore suburbanite who with his wife Em (Matilda Ziegler) comes to visit Fred to seek redress, to “process” the issue and obtain formal emotional closure by getting him to sign an explicit statement acknowledging his wrongs. Norris contrasts Andy’s suffering with the experience of Dee, who comes to the defense of Fred, while revealing that he, too, was abused as a child – and claims to be none the worse for it. Fred and Em bring all the conventional middle class psychological expression to their claims - but framed within the context of Downstate, it begins to sound more like "white people's problems." 

Norris seems fearless in treading into such troublemaker territory. His Pulitzer winning Clybourn Park visited historic efforts in 1959 to block African Americans from moving into a white Chicago neighborhood, then returned 50 years later to watch a reversal of prejudice as whites tried to gentrify the same now-black area. Downstate will test its audience even further, since pedophiles are largely today's lepers.

Downstate is directed by Pam MacKinnon, and she had her hands full to balance the energy emanating from this remarkable company of performers. A call out to Cecilia Noble as parole officer Ivy - it's almost a thankless role to play the character who has a thankless job, in a play like this. But thank you, Ivy, for very good performance. 

Of particular note, the production is a joint effort by Steppenwolf and the National Theatre of the U.K. It may surprise you to learn the cast is transatlantic. The flawless, broad, working class accent of extreme south suburban Effie (played by Aimee Lou Wood, a Manchester, England native) and the dulcet Kenilworth articulation of Em (played by Londoner Matilda Ziegler) were learned right here on Halsted street, under the tutelage of Gigi Buffington.

Downstate plays through November 18 at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. After that it moves to the National Theatre London in January 2019.