Review: Steep Theatre’s ‘The Writer’ is a gutsy look at theater itself, as seen through a feminist lens
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Are all plays reviewable? On the face of it, you’d say, yes of course. But there’s a genre of theatrical writing that I would call brilliantly self-protected.
Typically, such plays are about the theater itself, as is the case with the British play “The Writer,” penned by Ella Hickson, seen at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2018 at the height of the #MeToo movement, and now with gloves laced up for a U.S. premiere at Chicago’s Steep Theatre under the direction of Georgette Verdin.
Hickson, a feminist playwright, is writing about being a feminist playwright in what she sees as an oppressive, patriarchal industry filled with sleazy, hypocritical, gatekeeping men. They’re teachers, artistic directors and, yes, critics with their sexist dictates. She begins with a blistering diatribe by a character with a subtly shifting identity: Is this a theater student? An audience member at a small theater? Is this an actress? Is this someone who has returned to confront an abuser? All of the above?
You are kept guessing as Hickson employs Mametian techniques, turned on their heads.
But then, in a sudden shift of gears, she broadens her critique to include the entire cultural industry, and even how seemingly supportive men become complicit if and when, say, they pressure the woman in their lives to compromise her own creative identity and take that easy movie money. And then she broadens it more. “The Writer” argues that the very act of writing for a fundamentally naturalistic theater is itself imbued with sexism: The piece first inhabits that world, as if Hickson were showing us how she was taught and obligated to write, and then sets a grenade and lets it explode in the face of the audience. By the end of the night, she’s sent her characters (played by Krystal Ortiz, Lucy Carapetyan, Nate Faust, Peter Moore, Jodi Gage and Allyce Torres) careening into a free but unchartered landscape filled with sexual freedom and ritualized self-actualization.
That might be enough to let you know whether or not you will like a play that famously divided London audiences and critics, as Hickson surely intended. It’s certainly not nuanced in its point of view but it is strikingly funny at times. And it cuts to the quick.
Hickson’s point of view is British and feminist but the play put me in mind of Ike Holter’s “Red Rex,” also a Steep Theatre staging and a homegrown critique of white theater people inaccurately convinced of their own liberality. The power centers under authorial attack are different here, but the pieces are similarly caustic, unsparing and entertaining.
“Red Rex” was produced in Steep’s old home and benefited from that immediacy. “The Writer” is at the larger Edge Theatre (Steep is renovating its new home) and loses some of that intensity we associate with this theater. More specifically, that’s true in the second act: the first scene, which features Ortiz and Faust, is knockout. That’s followed by a second scene, between Carpetyan and Faust, that is very moving.
But when we get to the blow-it-all-up phase of the show, the production struggles. It loses its intensity, not least because Hickson has written such incredibly challenging scenes to stage, which is, perhaps, the point in a piece penned with intentionality, to say the least. I thought the show lost its way toward the end, but then as a white, aging, male critic imbued with how drama always has been written, mostly by men, that point of view will be a surprise to no one.
So be it. “The Writer” is a very interesting and gutsy show.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “The Writer” (3 stars)
When: Through Sept. 16
Where: Steep Theatre Company at The Edge Theatre, 5451 N. Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Tickets: $10-$40 at steeptheatre.com
