Playwright: Andrew Burden Swanson. At: Jackalope Theatre at the EP Theater, 1820 S. Halsted. Phone: 773-942-6150; $15. Runs through: Aug.29
Before five minutes of Andrew Burden Swanson’s play have elapsed, we have been given an abundance of information leading us to suspect that it will not have a happy ending: First, we are in the remote Appalachian mountains of Tennessee. Second, it is the early 1930s, with Prohibition still in effect throughout the United States. Third, the trio of men playing cards, using a stack of crates for a table, are in the business of manufacturing and distributing the illegal whiskey known locally as “moonshine,” and they drink a lot of their own product. Fourth, the town sheriff’s young daughter has gone missing, perhaps fleeing her father’s abuse.
With unhurried efficiency, the playwright then introduces us to one smuggler’s cousin—a blind boy with clairvoyant powers who draws pictures from his imagination. We also meet the amen-snorting neighbor who covets his farm, as well as her pretty niece, who wants only to escape her aunt’s scheme to marry her off to the disabled bachelor. Is this a forgotten relic of early 20th-century realism by Eugene O’Neill, or Maxwell Anderson, or perhaps Robert E. Sherwood? No, the author of this rural American tragedy is a 21-year-old student at Columbia College, and his fellow company members (with one or two exceptions) are, likewise, barely out of the classroom.
Such an auspicious world-premiere production of so astonishingly sophisticated a work of dramatic literature deserves a better setting than it gets in the EP Theater, an Escheresque venue as shabby as the milieu represented on its stage (accessed, not from the street, but the alley off the adjacent bank’s parking lot). Courtney Wheaton’s slides, meant to convey the visions of the sightless hero, are unrecognizable when projected on the uneven surface of John Holt’s scenic furnishings. And both AJ Ware and Taree Chadwick are to be commended for their quick thinking, upon being confronted during last Thursday’s performance by a malfunctioning spotlight, in shutting down the offending fixture rather than further disrupting the action in progress.
Indeed, the personnel comprising the itinerant Jackalope Theatre ensemble display uniform artistic savvy, retaining their focus under considerable duress to fulfill the promise afforded by this glimpse of fresh talent whose quality is certain to soon propel all involved far from the humble storefront where starwatchers are advised to see them now, while the evenings are still sunny enough to facilitate navigation of the labyrinthine Pilsen arts district.