Many Chicagoans of color report feeling uneasy around Chicago police officers. That is a fact, supported by ample data. There’s also hard evidence that white Chicagoans do not fully understand the hows and the whys of those feelings about the police — not least because they cannot and do not walk in those shoes around our beloved but difficult city.
Ike Holter’s new play at the Richard Christiansen Theater at the Biograph, "The Wolf at the End of the Block," is as clear, impassioned, blistering and heartfelt an explanation of that how and why as you could ever hope to see.
This piece is not entirely successful as a dramatic work — more about that in a moment — but when it comes to articulating the mistrust that lies at the core of so many of this city’s problems, and the violent crimes, unsolved shootings and other problems that spiral from that mistrust, then that is a worthy mission fulfilled. For this mistrust is the most correctable of Chicago’s many seemingly intractable dilemmas.
You’d think, right? If good people got on it, right?
Remarkably, Holter, one of Chicago’s most exciting young writers, achieves this without writing a story about police shootings, or police corruption, or any such official malfeasance. He starts with a Chicagoan, Abe, played by Gabriel Ruiz, who has been beaten up outside a bar.
The event was complicated; there was alcohol involved, for sure. Abe claims it was a police officer and, with the help of his sister, Miranda (Ayssette Munoz), and Nunley (Bear Bellinger), the guy who owns the restaurant where Abe works, he tries to be heard. This search for the right conduit to articulate a pain suffered — a superhero to come to the rescue — is a constant theme in Holter’s writing about Chicago. There is a longing that stirs hope in the soul. But here, as in his other plays, the conduit is flawed. Frida (Sandra Marquez) is a hard-boiled investigative reporter (are there any other kind in plays?) who immediately theorizes that he does not have enough evidence to cut through layers of self-protection.
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Frida isn’t even remotely realistic — at one point she seems to work for a newspaper (maybe this one) but she comes with a camera crew. It’s a flaw in the piece — Holter either has to really keep Frida in some symbolic realm of language and desire, or actually flesh out these details, given what he wants to do with the play, politically speaking. Clearly, he’s deeply conflicted about the media’s role in the city’s culture of mistrust and fair enough there, but that does not absolve him from clarity and consistency.
But it’s the last half of the work that Holter’s chops reveal themselves with such vivacity, even though the plotting remains vague.
Nunley finds himself in a different Chicago bar, drinking, relaxing and chatting with a genial white guy (James D. Farruggio) who might be a police officer, maybe the police officer, maybe somebody who covered up for that police officer, maybe just a really good police officer who likes and wants to talk with someone different from himself. The point of the scene — which Bellinger and Farruggio play with breakneck stakes and formidable intensity and honesty — is that Nunley just doesn’t know if he’s safe.
And since he doesn’t know, he can’t root himself anywhere, which means everything is more and more tense, mistakes get amplified, and, well, Holter lets you know that the cycle that caught Abe can snare anybody.
This Teatro Vista premiere, directed by Ricardo Gutierrez, actually is the third of Holter’s plays to deal with different experiences by Chicagoans of different stripes, all set (I think) on the same troubled Chicago night. "Prowess," "Sender" and "Wolf at the End of the Block" have been performed at different small theaters all over the city, the work of different directors, with long lags between.
I’ve managed to catch all three, and I believe there are more to come, but they’ve not been packaged well, and thus are not easy either to find or to put together in your head once you have found them. Sunday afternoon at Victory Gardens, I started to wonder what might happen if Holter took a breath, fixed ’em all up and then they were done again. Might help us all understand each other a little better.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
"THE WOLF AT THE END OF THE BLOCK" – 3 STARS
When: Through March 5
Where: Richard Christiansen Theater at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $25-$30 at 773-871-3000 or teatrovista.org
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