Earlier this month, one of the officers charged in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray was promoted to head the Baltimore Police Department’s Public Integrity Bureau, which investigates misconduct allegations against the force. A bystander account of the horrifying abuse Gray suffered when taken into custody is one of the most searing of the 19 stories re-created by three actors in TimeLine Theatre’s Chicago premiere production of Notes from the Field by Anna Deavere Smith. The issues the play addresses are as fresh and raw as today’s headlines.
Is this show a long, hard sit? Yes. Is interrogating the school-to-prison pipeline an essential task for theater in America today? Also yes. And is Notes from the Field an effective vehicle for giving audiences a visceral feel for the ongoing trauma of a system that perpetuates racial and class inequality by refusing to invest in education and other basic needs even as prison and policing budgets explode? Most definitely.
Mildred Marie Langford, Adhana Reid and Shariba Rivers do a uniformly excellent job of delivering these 19 monologues and imbuing each person they portray–including students, academics, pastors, prisoners, activists, politicians and victims’ families–with distinct humanity.
Though the people are unrelated, the thematic thrust of their stories creates a cohesive narrative. We live in a nation where you can be arrested and beaten simply for looking a police officer directly in the eye. Where you can go to prison for murder because you were present when your boyfriend killed the man who was raping you. Where you can be thrown in jail for objecting to a school police officer throwing a fellow student across the room in her chair-desk. We also live in a nation where good people make the case and fight for meaningful change that can end inequality at its source rather than dooming new generations to a life of trauma, hopelessness and impossible choices.
These scenes have been culled from more than 250 accounts, but Notes from the Field would be more effective still with some judicious editing of the 19 remaining re-creations to bring the running time down from nearly three hours to something closer to two. Even at its current length, though, this show is well worth seeing.
Notes From the Field runs through March 24 at TimeLine Theatre.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Brett Beiner Photography
