When I was a struggling writer in the early ’90s with a fiction MFA and bathroom walls papered with literary magazine rejection slips, I lived two blocks from Edgewater’s Berger Park in a 300-square-foot, roach-infested studio apartment in the two-building bohemian haven known as Artist in Residence. To get in back then, you had to meet with the building manager and show proof that you were a working playwright, director, actor, novelist, musician, painter, dancer, filmmaker or other fine artist. After squeezing my way in with an unpublished novel, I kept mostly to myself. But I do distinctly recall actors roaming the halls practicing lines at odd hours and playwrights talking up possible storefront productions to anyone they encountered in the lobby. Many cigarettes were smoked. Gallons of cheap whiskey and wine were consumed. Many of us stuck with the arts in one way or another. Someone should assemble an oral history of the place.
There’s a fancy pizza joint on the corner where the bodgea once stood ready to sell big plastic bottles of Coke II for 99 cents and Little Debbie Zebra Cakes for a quarter. The hooker who worked the sidewalk is also long gone. Loyola has really spruced the place up.
But the Coach House at Berger Park is bringing that greasy, striving storefront vibe back to Edgewater with Jackalope Theatre’s production of The Smuggler, a one-man, one-act show billed as “a thriller in rhyme.” For 75 minutes, in a space with an audience capacity of 25, Andrew Burden Swanson holds forth as Tim Finnegan in a neighborhood tavern on Amity Island, Massachusetts, where this naturalized American citizen of Irish extraction found himself pulled into a life of crime based on exploiting undocumented immigrants from Latin America.
And a corker of a story it is, related first in Finnegan’s knowing brogue, and later in the dialects of many other characters, including his wife and her old New England family, a human trafficker, a shifty bartender and several of the newly arrived immigrant workers. You see, Finnegan’s a frustrated fiction writer with a wee drinking problem, but now that they have a baby, his wife expects better of him, including a house he could never afford. Unless he should tumble onto an illicit opportunity or two…
The playwright, Ronán Noone, himself an American hailing from Ireland, relates in the program that the play was inspired by an undocumented worker from Brazil who confided in him because she knew he had worked as a journalist. She told him about being smuggled across the border by a coyote before being sent to Martha’s Vineyard to paint houses, which is where she met and worked with Noone.
The noir tale is packed with twists and violent confrontations, but at heart it represents an effort, one that becomes explicit by the end, to show how we all are complicit in turning a blind eye to the trafficking and exploitation of undocumented immigrants who keep our lawns mowed and our restaurant tables cleared. That’s certainly a timely message in this city, and it lands well enough. But just as my use of explicit and complicit in the first sentence of this paragraph may have jumped out at you as an odd juxtaposition of words, so too does Noone’s choice to write this play in rhyme. At best, the poetics fly by just underneath the radar, but then a few awkwardly constructed sentences creep in to keep the rhyme scheme going and it’s all you can focus on for a few minutes. It feels like the kind of thing you might write to win a bet at just the type of bar depicted here, while you were living in a cramped studio a couple blocks away.
So yeah, I could do without the couplets, and the moments of direct address inserted by director Gus Menary because, as it turns out, that becomes a necessary part of the play’s coda as written.
But this is a slickly told tale, with an incredibly challenging role ably handled by Swanson, and boy did it bring back vivid memories of my hardscrabble early twenties. You want a taste of old-school Chicago storefront theater delivered with a daredevil’s commitment to entertaining an audience sitting inches from the action? Get yourself to Edgewater and strap in for the ride.
The Smuggler runs through March 16 at Berger Park Coach House.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Joel Maisonet
