An Imaginative Map
Posted by Joy Meads on 9/18/2008This weekend, I spent a chunk of time researching an article about The Seafarer I’m writing for the program. I rashly agreed to write about Baldoyle—the Dublin suburb in which the play is set—despite my complete and utter ignorance about the region. So, I’ve been spending some time at the library. Now I know I’m outing myself as a massive dork by saying this, but it’s actually kind of fun for me. While reading about Baldoyle’s geography and history, I’ve been able to create an imaginative map of this place I’ve never visited. I’m dreaming up an idea of what it might mean to be from there.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what the idea of place means in our work. Last season, Steppenwolf received a lot of gratifying attention as August: Osage County made a splash in New York City. But while Tracy Letts won national awards and was wooed by international producers, he was writing a play about home. Superior Donuts was, Tracy said, a “love letter to Chicago.”
Now, I moved to Chicago about a year ago and I’ve still got a lot of roots in California. All my family lives there, including a nephew who’s growing so quickly that he seems to have entire metamorphoses in the six-month gaps between my visits. So, as only a partial initiate, my experience of the play was different than most people here. I was struck by a question that came up with surprising frequency in the Superior Donuts post-show discussions. Several times a week, someone would ask whether we thought the play would work for audiences outside of Chicago. As a relative newcomer who found the play deeply moving, the answer was obvious to me. Of course it will. But it’s also true that the play has a unique resonance for its hometown audience. There’s one moment I waited for whenever I saw the show. Mid-way through the first act, Arthur has a monologue of reminiscences about his childhood in Chicago. Every night, when he mentioned driving home past “the giant neon lips of Magikist,” a spontaneous sigh of recognition would ripple through the audience. Those lips are long gone and I personally had no idea what he was talking about. But I felt privileged to witness that moment of collective memory, when a group of people, assembled for one night only, shared a recollection of a Chicago that’s past.
Of course, there was nothing romanticized about Tracy Letts’ love letter. The Chicago of the play was a complex mix of vibrant diversity with some undercurrents of xenophobia, ample opportunity alongside seemingly impermeable economic barriers, great heart highlighted by occasional cruelty. At the close of a season themed around the question “what does it mean to be an American?”, Superior Donuts asked us to think about what it means to be a Chicagoan. Just ten months in, I’d definitely feel like a poser using that word to describe myself—like a high-school freshman that proclaims himself a thespian after taking Drama 101. But I think the experience of sitting with an audience of Chicagoans thinking about home made me feel just a little bit more integrated into the community. I’m glad. I really love it here.
After exploring our national character in the ‘07-’08 season, we’re going on a world tour in ‘08-’09. This season’s plays were written by (or are based upon works by) artists from Japan, Ireland, France, America, and Renaissance England. Of course, I’m creating a false dichotomy here. To paraphrase a character from Kafka on the Shore (the show in previews now), we can travel as far as we like, but we can’t escape our own life experience. This season’s plays will allow us to project ourselves imaginatively into different times and cultures. And as we do so, we can’t help but locate ourselves in the other and feel the similarities that connect us across time and space. In Superior Donuts, that empathic link made me feel a little more rooted here. This season, it’s gonna be fun to put forth little imaginative tendrils into Shikoku and Baldoyle.