Playwright: Brooke Berman. At: Theatre Seven of Chicago at the Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln. Phone: 773-404-7336; $15-$24. Runs through: June 27
Not every homeless person lives on the street or in their car. Brooke Berman’s play, making its world premiere under the auspices of Theatre Seven of Chicago, presents us with four young people trapped in that residential limbo between one room w/shared bath in their parents’ house and a bed they can call their own.
That last defining factor can be literal, as illustrated by the slackerly Astor, newly-advanced from couch-surfing to ownership of a futon AND an air-mattress (for guests) in his own SRO. His brother, Jesse, an earnest low-level professor at Columbia University, is recently divorced with no clue how to set up his own household—but Bess, a spoiled student chafing under the compromises associated with roommates, is perfectly willing to supervise his resettlement according to her own (always impeccable, doncha know?) taste. And then there’s Ruth, wandering like a stray puppy through a series of house-sits and sublets as she fantasizes about an apartment with a bona fide-grownup lease.
Most “New York” plays reflect middle values—age, class and Manhattan district—but Berman’s urban nomads are a breed proliferating in prose literature, but rarely found in modern drama. The less-affluent parts of town (not disguised as a futuristic dystopia, as in most youth-oriented scenarios, but realistic down to the cross-streets pictured on the Rand-McNally screen projections) are shown to harbor pilgrims haunted by the swirl of hope and despair comprising a rite of passage immediately recognizable to audiences of all ages and regions—for what free-roaming American citizen has not fallen prey to anomie at some time in their lives?
Berman never condescends to her personnel with easy sentiment, however, but takes each of her four waifs as seriously as THEY do. Neither does Theatre Seven, whose reputation is founded on their sensitive and unhurried approach to material that, in lesser hands, could verge on cloying. Sarah Burnham and Tamar Daskin’s scenic decor—consisting mostly of packing boxes—evokes the oxymoron of sorrow at one journey’s end vying with excitement at another’s beginning, while the quartet of actors lend urgency to personalities too often shrugged off nowadays as sitcom stereotypes. Despite a few first-night flaws (notably, the almost inaudible volume of the videophone sequences), their united efforts conspire to send us home elated at the progress augured by the irony-laced resolution.