The facts in the case couldn’t be barer: On Feb. 28, 1914, the Illinois Supreme Court convicted one Forrest Duncan of Sycamore, Ill., on the charge of raping and impregnating 13-year-old Eva Hamel, a servant in his household. The former was sent to the state penitentiary in Joliet, while the latter had her baby at a Salvation Army hospital in Chicago. No notoriety attached itself to this crime (sadly common in its time), nor to the persons involved—until David Kodeski saw in it the foundation for the fourth in his True Life Tales series of “found-memorabilia” stories.
But after delving the details documented in the Illinois Official Reporter, Kodeski admits, he and his three co-writers—Diana Slickman, Connor Kalista and Rachel Claff—encountered an impasse. This may account for the decidedly uneven tone of The Sycamore Story’s opening-night text. After 40 minutes devoted to exploration of the case—its minutiae orchestrated into a toccata-and-fugue for four voices, with Kodeski providing visual interest in the form of an exhaustive chalkboard diagram—the narrative abruptly departs from the characters about whom we are now as curious as their would-be biographers.
For the next 40 minutes, Kodeski & Company acquaint us with the various artifacts providing information about the intimate lives of our ancestors—diaries, journals, photographs, home movies, audio and video tapes—with selections therefrom presented in a manner designed to generate ironical amusement at these quaint old foozles. Then, just as abruptly, Kodeski announces the surprise discovery of Hamel’s descendants, and we return for an epilogue chronicling their history to the present day.
If Kodeski et al. had restricted their focus to a single narrative, the result might have been a coherent, if brief, insight into The Way We Were. But their often naive speculations during the show’s protracted digression (“Did these people ever imagine that strangers would be reading their words so many years later?”—as if enlightenment of future generations was not a universal impetus to self-documentation) reveals the egotism of the play’s authors. Or perhaps this whole segment of the evening’s program was merely a device to stretch the sketchy material—an expedient measure now rendered unnecessary by newly gathered data. If The Sycamore Story teaches us nothing else, it is that minimal evidence is no barrier to hypothetical conclusions regarding others’ motives.